Yes, there's a Tech Bubble. But that's OK [View All]

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/bubbles_and_silicon_valley/

Open...and Shut Even as Silicon Valley sages Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel pooh-pooh the notion of a tech bubble, there are clear signs that tech is frothier than may be sustainable.

Competition for engineering talent is fierce, and startups sprout too quickly. In addition, there's something incongruous about a world where everything is falling but tech continues to rise. And yet the thing that best suggests this tech bubble may be healthy is that the problems its primary beneficiaries are trying to solve are often big, long-term societal problems.

Of course, this isn't tremendously different from the 2001 dot-com bubble. Back then, the internet was The Next Big Thing, prompting investors and entrepreneurs to throw caution to the wind and put anything and everything online, as venture capitalist John Doerr recently opined. From that wreckage emerged a few clear winners – such as Amazon, eBay, and Google – even as $5 trillion in market value was wiped clean.

Today, there are plenty of silly products foisted on the world by Stanford undergraduates, but there are other clear winners like Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga. It's possible that just as the internet wasn't enough to sustain weak ideas in 2001, "social" won't be enough to keep bad businesses afloat in 2011.