[irishcoffee]

I’ve always thought “man it would have been a great job selling shovels and pickaxes during the gold rush” back in the day.”

I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>

[jeffbee]

The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.

[cyberax]

Cisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine.

From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.

[bryanlarsen]

> Cisco is doing great.

https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO

[jeffbee]

The glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.

[cyberax]

Yeah, hardware companies got hit hard. But dotcom also coincided with the de-industrialization era, with manufacturing moving out of the US, with a double whammy of commodization. So it's hard to disentangle the causes.

And then I can't really remember many Internet-focused software pick&shovels companies from that era. I was only starting my professional career at that time, though.

[fragmede]

Qwest

[shellwizard]

3Com / US Robotics - dead

Nortel - dead

Global crossing - dead

[warkdarrior]

Microsoft - doing fine

Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla)

Intel - almost dead

Palm - dead

Qualcomm - still around

[nerdsniper]

INTC shot up >300% in the past 8 months and is now at its highest stock price ever, fwiw.

[cyberax]

I guess Netscape counts. Palm produced devices, so it was not really picks&shovels.

Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet.

[TitaRusell]

Nobody actually goes broke anymore man. They'll still be multi millionaires. They will still have a contact list. Hell you will receive a pardon if it comes to that.

It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.

[jeffbee]

Well, I worked at a picks-and-shovels scam where four executives were convicted of federal offenses and two got prison sentences. I don't know if they are still rich or not.

[newsclues]

Working out for nvidia right now

[ohNoe5]

Hardware is important to operation of computers and software as we know them

A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much

[irishcoffee]

Right, and Google owns 25% of the hardware.

[GuB-42]

I guess they failed at the "during the gold rush" part.

Selling picks and shovels after the gold rush is a terrible idea.

[kirubakaran]

Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke, and he practically had a monopoly on pickaxes by buying up the entire supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan

[khuey]

TIL who Brannan Street in SF is named after.

[nadermx]

Went broke "Following the divorce, he became a brewer and developed a problem with alcohol."

[kirubakaran]

Well, if a divorce and drinking could make him go broke, he wasn't that wealthy, was he?