Yes, and I think that was only possible back then because venture capital firms got involved pretty late. Then, as a result of the dot-com bubble they themselves caused, they burned through a lot of money and destroyed a lot of jobs. Ultimately, they shifted their focus to investing heavily in companies where it was clear how profitable they would become and that their market power could be expanded through acquisitions.
Today, it seems almost impossible to me that a startup without investors could achieve the same level of success as those early Internet companies that have become global corporations. If someone has a good idea, the company is either bought out immediately, or the idea is simply stolen by companies such as Rocket Internet, whose deep pockets quickly ensure that the copy prevails over the original.
The successful startups largely gained discipline and structure from these investors though. Lots of the mid-1990s companies succeeded because of this investment andthe structure that came with it.
I get to deal with tech support now for my parents and my college-age trainees. Basic Windows shit. None of them had to learn Windows basics or coding languages of any kind, but I did. My degrees are in psychology so it’s not like I purposely acquired these skills for work, but I couldn’t do my work without a thorough understanding of how to work around PC limitations and forcing proprietary laboratory software to do what I want it to do.
Young people didn’t disrupt industries, computers did. Now computers are in every industry so disruption is hard again.
So we can expect young computers to do it again?
Information is a close secondary power to wealth. If you have more information than someone else, you can leverage that difference to increase your wealth while decreasing theirs.
There’s a reason all these big companies want your data…
Lol. If I have to explain what “show me file system” and “save files where I want you to save them” mean, that one generation is millennials
Edit: oh, I get it. Sorry. Well, it does seem like that
Pretty sure millennials are the only generation to properly know how to work a computer. Gen z and alpha grew up on smartphones.
Don’t forget GenX, they cut their teeth on DOS and other such horrors.
Every generation learns the technology that they grow up with then as they grow older and wiser think “screw this new shit, none of it makes my life any better”. We’re literally chasing our own tales
Utterly ass-backwards. Young people can’t use computers for shit, they’re usually worse than Boomers. It’s GenX and Millenials that actually know their ass from a hole in the ground.
That’s the point of the post
I am not a smart man. :(
It’s ok, as long as you know your ass from a hole in the ground.
The “young people disrupting industries” talking points were raised mostly in relationship to genx and millennials. People like Jeff Bezos, the “pay-pal mafia” people, Zuck, Karp, Silverman and Sharp, etc.
Yeah, it was the millennials who were “disrupting” industries and “killing” industries.
Yeah, generally the article titles were all “How Millennials are destroying the [x] industry,” because they had the Internet available just before the corruption of hypercapitalism, and used it to inform their culture and decisions. The earlier days of google search where you could find good information that wasn’t SEO poisoned. Whereas today “Internet = Phone = Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok” to the majority of people. Terrible day for the World Wide Web than the ad industry realized you can pay models and celebs to create FOMO for shit like Stanley Cups.
I was told they didn’t know ‘how to use computers’.
I’ve seen little evidence of it, in general. That so many are still giving out all their personal information for free (and seeing no problem with it) is kind of telling.
