Remember the early days, the 90's tech boom back in San Francisco? The gluttonous wealth of job listings for every arts and sciences major? The non-stop stock option talk, webgrrls, Craig? The pool parties at Backflip? The infectious, frenetic air of entrepenuerism? Didn't you think that every bright, ambitious, pretty person on the planet had congregated in that city? Yes, those were the days.
After scattering from Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York, all of us dot-com refugees sought shelter in real jobs. Throughout the midwest, we became mortgage brokers and paralegals, accountants and dog groomers. We took our 401K's out of tech and put them into stocks that would never, ever become obsolete [toilet paper, for instance]. We deleted that gold rush chapter in our lives and bought affordable tract homes in the suburbs/exurbs at obscenely low interest rates. We purchased the entire catalog of Pottery Barn leather couches, sconces and tableware. We refinanced, just because we could.
Three years, barren of IPO's, passed. The internet quietly passed from the realm of the novel into a seamless, integral part of our culture. Today's teenagers have never known a time without the internet.
The grand prophecies, all the hype of the dot-com era, continued their slow burn into the lexicon of daily life.
And a little underdog company called Google, the poster-child of post-crash survivors, has grown up to take over the world. They came up with a simple, straightforward business model, which they put into action, and lo and behold: they began to make money, and grow at a reasonable rate. Enough money that they were able to go public, and restart the hype, and find themselves worth more than the GNP of the state of California.
A resurrection of sorts has begun. All that vicious backlash has calmed down, and there is light on the proverbial horizon. Case in point: Didja see Google featured on 60 minutes on Sunday?
You would think that Google had revolutionized not only the internet, but the very fabric of American culture as well. Their business model? Sponsored links, an awestruck Leslie Stahl reported, as Google's young and perky and blond marketing person explained, in painfully rudimentary terms, the concept of online advertising.
And the original and new ideas planned for new Google products? Leslie couldn't gush enough about them. Take a page of the web and translate it into any language. Search for the nearest pharmacy from your cell phone. Get satellite pictures of your neighborhood.
As Leslie raved about all these new and revolutionary ideas, I thought: Wait a minute. These aren't new ideas at all. [And I don't think I'm alone on this. ]They're the same ideas we at AGENCY.COM were pitching to every potential client we could snag a meeting with. Pacific Bell, E*TRADE, Peet's Coffee & Tea, ZING.COM --- it didn't matter what product they sold, we pitched all those cool ideas. Some of them actually made it into reality ten years ago, didn't they?
I mean, what about babelfish? Or the Jive Talk translator? Even Seth Godin says this internet thing is catching on.
Maybe these ideas have been around the whole time, but Google just figured out a new way to get it done? Maybe it's the code that's so revolutionary?
I don't know. But I caught a slight whiff of the promise and possibility that was so rampant in the good old San Francisco days, and it awoke something within.
The media may be putting a new spin on old ideas and spoonfeeding it to us, but maybe this time we're ready for it.
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