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Dot-com bubble
Source:
Bloomberg
Financial Markets
overview of the development of the Internet. An interview with
Steve Rogers, head of production at BBC New Media, discusses
the design of the BBC homepage, which is shown as a case study.
Mark Podlaseck, who researches the navigation of large databases
at IBM, describes in his interview the rationale behind his
beautiful design for the “glassengine,” a Web site that allows you
to browse the music of Philip Glass.
This chapter only touches a tiny part of the design of the
Internet, which is a gigantic subject worthy of many books, but it
offers some illustrative expert opinions and examples.
Dot-com madness
Do you remember the heady days of the dot-coms? You had to
be living in the San Francisco Bay area to appreciate the full
extremes of the craziness. Silicon Valley was powering along, to
keep pace with the need for server farms, routers, and of course
chips, chips, chips. Up in San Francisco, the area between Market
Street and the bay was being redeveloped at breathtaking speed,
housing an endless flood of startup e-commerce businesses and
Web design consultancies.The business plans for the startups often
projected no more than banner ads as a revenue stream, and still
they were generously funded by venture capital.Townsend Street
was dubbed “Multimedia Gulch,” housing design shops such as
Razorfish, Sapient, and Scient, which were surfing the wave of
change as every company in the USA added a Web site, and many
of them added an e-business arm to their portfolio. Junior
designers were commanding six-figure salaries and being charged
to clients at $2,000 a day. Rents in town were skyrocketing,
driving away the residents who were not benefiting from inflated
salaries. It was nuts!
With a little common sense, it was easy to see that the design
boom was not going to last very long.The wave of change that
accelerated demand was only going to continue until all the
companies had their first Web site or their first e-business. Once
that was in place, they would only need a low level of design
effort for maintenance or an update several years down the line.
It was also easy to see that many of the e-commerce business
The Internet
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