Web Businesses
When 'WWW' was released by CERN in 1992, the number of Internet hosts had just broken the one million mark. By 1993, with the release of the first browser, Mosaic, the growth rate of the Internet, how fast it was expanding in terms of usage and content, was a staggering 341%. This growth kept up for several years and gave rise to a new class of businesses, the Dot-Coms, start-up companies created by eager, young entrepreneurs. The opportunity to cheaply access a fantastic customer-base worldwide created a booming market for products and services related to the Internet. The web was a new killer-app, it brought together consumer, and provider, in seamless, and lost-cost ways. While some of these companies soon went bankrupt, hundreds of others experienced roaring success and their stocks surged. Unfortunately, the success was short lived. Those who had invested in the early 90's in these start-ups and had managed to sell before 2000 became multi-millionaires, those that lacked the foresight to do so went bankrupt. As rapidly as their stocks had grown, soon the competition between companies providing the same service, attempting to monopolize their own sector was so severe and free spending among executives was so rampant that many were forced to go out of business. However, these companies did leave their mark. Some of these startups like E-Bay, an online auction house, Amazon.com, a distributor of literature, Paypal, an online peer-to-peer payment service, and Yahoo.com, the famous search engine, are remarkably successful and hold prime spots on the Fortune 500 list. The key to web businesses, is communication and access. The Internet allows these businesses to sidestep the expenses of advertising and consumer research and instead gives consumers an easy way to find what they want. The Internet guarantees a reward for the true entrepreneur who creates the new 'killer-app' that is more than just some average product.
Examples of online companies that survived the recession.
|
|
|
