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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.