As I recall, the Internet was supposed to render location irrelevant. Pioneering dot-com entrepreneurs, as well as more than a few investors, saw the online world as flat and filled with an endless supply of customers. Of course, many of these dot-coms became dot-bombs.
The bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 has often been blamed on what then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan described as “irrational exuberance,” but that’s only one part of the story. In a new book, David R. Bell, the Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests other reasons for the bust, reasons that should concern anyone with an interest in online commerce. The book doesn’t address the bubble directly, but it does deflate the idea that underpinned much of the exuberance in the second half of 1990s—that the Internet is always a flat, friction-less marketplace.
