It happened with the railways, with the canals, gold, the South Sea Bubble. Every time there is a rush of investors with the invention of a new technology, the bubble bursts and sanity eventually prevails. This is a perfectly normal market phenomenon. The experiences should teach us something about how to run a business. The people who were going into these online businesses had little idea of what they were really doing.
Technological revolution precedes cultural revolution.
There was a technical capability in place without the knowledge of how best to use it. We have an opportunity to use technology imaginatively, not just to move traditional offline models of retailing onto the Internet. There was also a problem with marketing. We can all think of companies that went for the big-bang launch. This leads to a spike of usage that the sites are never going to see again.