If it seems as if news agencies have been droning on about Internet failures for an eternity, rest assured, it's not a hallucination.
As of March 10, a full year will have passed since the technology stock market's best-known indicator -- the Nasdaq composite index -- hit its all-time high of 5,133. Since then, it's sunk to just about 100 points of 2,000 with no clear bottom in sight.
Nearly as many months have passed since the IPO craze -- which turned many a profitless Internet company into a multibillion-dollar stock market dynamo -- crawled to a standstill.
Since then, hardly a day goes by without word of another highly touted Internet firm throwing in the virtual towel. EToys. Pets.com. Boo.com. Gazoontite.com. Go.com.
By and large, the stories are markedly similar: massive losses; massive layoffs; overextended marketing campaigns that never brought in the customers; a collective failure to accurately foresee changing market conditions.
So perhaps now it's time to step back a few yards.
Time to pontificate on what lessons may be learned.
And time, finally, to speculate on when the shakeout may finally come to an end.
Following are snippets from Internet employees, executives and investment types on the state of the Meltdown of 2000-2001:
Don't unsubscribe to the messenger: Like a lot of folks in the Internet business, Ben Silverman has had his fill of bad news.
Unlike a lot of folks, however, Silverman is directly responsible for publishing much of it. As editor of DotComScoop, he gathers tidbits about the latest Net industry goings on through a network of wireless and online contributors.
"I think people have got too sick of hearing about it. I'm sick of hearing about it and I'm in the middle of it," said Silverman, who launched the site in December.
"I can't imagine anyone not involved in the Internet, technology, media or finance industries being remotely interested in hearing about some dot-com they've never heard of shutting down," he said.
While the meltdown continues, Silverman believes many industry insiders -- including venture capitalists -- are simply learning to ignore the negative news.
The trend applies to fellow journalists as well. Silverman said he's spoken to editors at a lot of publications who are telling their writers to skip the layoff and bomb stories unless it's a big name.
"I think the lessons have been learned for the most part and every day there are more lessons being learned," he said. "You can't ignore the facts, but we certainly don't have to talk about it all the time."
Not such a bad thing: If the Nasdaq meltdown has done anything for investors in the past year, it has finally created the opportunity to buy technology stocks at relatively cheap prices.
But now that the stocks are low, Fred Siegel is finding investors are no longer sure they really want them.
"Two years ago, people were saying we want more technology. Why don't we have more technology in our account?" said Siegel, an investment advisor and president of Siegel Group, Inc. "The perception was it could not go down."
Reality set in some time around April 2000. Since then, things haven't been the same.
"Now people are looking at their accounts and saying: Do we really need that much technology?" Siegel said.
Contrary to what the rest of the market is doing, Siegel believes now is a pretty good time to look at buying tech stocks, particularly shares of bellwether companies that are trading at less than half their former highs. His picks include Sun, Oracle and Microsoft.
Siegel believes that much of the current decline in tech stock prices was caused by analysts and investors setting expectations for last year that were too high. This happened in part because analysts failed to take into account the effects of Y2K.
In late 1999, many companies put off large technology-related purchases until after New Year 2000 out of fear of Y2K-related glitches. As a result, there was a great deal of pent-up demand for new products in early 2000, and purchases skyrocketed.
The problem, however, was that many folks on Wall Street mistakenly expected the volume of purchases to keep increasing at the same rate in the following quarters.
Not so bad II: Andrew Lo is the kind of guy who believes most things in the financial world follow a logical pattern. The MIT finance professor even wrote a book on the subject two years ago, entitled A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street.
Given that background, it should come as no surprise that Lo thinks the tech stock boom and subsequent downturn followed a rather predictable path.
"The run up in technology stocks was a harbinger of a correction at a later date," said Lo, who compares the rise and fall to similar cycles that have affected stocks of conglomerates, auto manufacturers and companies in a wide range of industries in previous decades.
Lo believes there's a positive aspect to the freefall in Internet shares and, to some degree, the broader tech stock downturn. As ill-conceived companies fall by the wayside, it'll make it easier for sounder businesses to get attention from investors.
"It's true that only the strongest will survive. But after that bloodletting you're going to see a resurgence in new opportunities," he said. "This is known as creative destruction. It's a basic principle of ecology that can be applied directly to economic growth."
Don't forget you: There are probably easier jobs to have in 2001 than that of a communications director for a consumer-oriented Internet startup that gives away its main product for free.
At least that's the impression one gets when talking to Jeff Shafer, who holds such a position with Vios, a North Carolina startup that created a software download that turns Web surfing into a three-dimensional experience.
"Somehow, consumer has become a bad word. And it's not a bad word," Shafer said.
He believes the parade of closures at retail and media sites in the last few months has caused investors to shy away from consumer-oriented Internet companies altogether. In the long run, he thinks the dearth of venture capital will stifle innovation.
Vios puts out its software for download on the Net in February. Now the company is trying to raise a second round of funding to keep itself afloat until its application is universally acclaimed as "the next big thing."
The work involved in raising money is far more extensive than it was a year ago, when Vios got its first round of funding. At that time, the company's CEO said, it needed little more than a product demonstration and a broad outline of a business plan to generate interest from venture capitalists.
Now, the VCs want to see revenue, a user base, and a completed product.
Take a seat: If anything, the past year has taught Mobeen Khan to think lean.
As CEO of Inzigo, a startup that's developing applications for call centers to process and respond to spoken requests, Khan is adjusting to changing times. In these days of widespread closures and diminishing investment returns, working at a startup isn't expected to be a luxury business.
"I'm only going to make hires that are absolutely necessary to get to the next stage," said Khan, who believes that startups in the cash-flush days of 1999 and early 2000 engaged in a great deal of excess.
People looking for a job at a startup company in 2001 can expect a very different atmosphere than that which prevailed just a few short months ago, said Khan.
For one thing, there are no more companies that have Herman Miller designer chairs at every workstation. Office pool tables are a rare sight. And no one, it seems, is vesting quite so much hope in the future wealth potential of startup stock options.
