‘It was a shock when Boo went under [1] ‘The Legacy of the e-Bubble—Lessons for Managers

The title for this paper is a quotation that continues ‘….because up until the last day we always thought that we'd be saved or that there'd be some solution. ‘It was made by Ernst Malmsten, the co-founder of Boo.com—perhaps the most spectacular dot.com failure that spent $130 million in less than 18 months, captured very little revenue and whose total assets were sold for less than $800,000 (Mikhail, 2002, What happened next? Boo.com co-founder Ernst Malmsten describes life after the party. The Observer Magazine, July 6th 2002). We have used this quotation as a title to our paper as we feel that it well represents the folly of the thinking of the time leading up to the e-Bubble.

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Keynes was no doubt also alluding to this when he pointed out that ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ (Keynes, J.M., The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936)

An interesting aside to this is the fact that, although many academics were very sceptical about the dot.com euphoria, some were not. This resulted in a number of universities and business schools jumping onto the Internet bandwagon and setting up MBAs or other Masters degrees in e-Commerce and e-Business. Other universities created chairs in e-Commerce and e-Business. Some of these universities may now feel that they did this rather prematurely.

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There are those who would argue that the new Internet and Web entrepreneurs were neither ignorant nor disdainful, but rather they were optimists who wanted to create a new business paradigm. They believed that with the turn of the new millennium there would he a new business order. It is not clear why these ideas occurred as they did and we would argue that totally unrealistic optimism is actually disdain for received wisdom.

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