No longer will we be so mesmerized by investor hype that we will forget the fundamentals that govern a sector's ascent to grace on Nasdaq, even if the peddlers of the hype are such Wall Street luminaries as Morgan's Mary Meeber or Merrill's retailing is an awful business, online or offline, with razor thin margins, cutthroat competition, fluid entry barriers and huge upfront marketing expenses. Yet it times changes, so does conventional wisdom in the financial markets. Internet bookstores are just not cool on Wall Street. Th3e Internet retailing party is over and the terrified guests are never coming back. This begs the obvious question.
History never repeats itself, though historians of ten do.
I do not believe that optics will end up as Dotcom Bust Part Two. Optics is not a dream for the future but an interlocking set of disruptive, revolutionary technologies that are crucial to the future of the world's telecom architecture. The only technology platform that can meet these strategic imperatives is optical networking. This is totally different form the dotcom bubble, where the entire value proposition was based on a possibly flawed assumption that eyeballs could be monetised by online media and e-commerce revenues alone without spending a fortune on building an offline brand. Moreover, barriers to entry into the dotcom universe proved illusory.