- The Long Cycle
- Wild Gyrations
- The New Economy: Down but Not Out
- Dot-Coms: From Deified to Demonized
- Dot-Coms Provided Many Lessons
- Internet Growth
- Early Days Yet in the Internet Revolution
- B2C Sites—Not All Failures
- The Dot-Com Model—Profits Are Essential
- Not the First Such Challenge: Radio Struggled Too
- The Future Is Bright
Internet Growth
Despite the slowdown in the economy and the crash in dot-com stocks, the Internet Economy continued to grow rapidly. The fourth semi-annual survey by the University of Texas Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, funded by Cisco Systems, showed continued strong growth in 2000.11 They found that the Internet Economy generated an estimated $830 billion in revenue that yearrepresenting a 58 percent increase over 1999 and a 156 percent gain over 1998. They divide the Net Economy companies into four groups: infrastructure, applications, intermediaries, and commerce. All posted enormous revenue growth in the first half of the year.
The infrastructure companies include the telecoms, Internet service providers, backbone carriers, network hardware and software firms, PC and server manufacturers, security vendors, and fiber-optics makers. This groupwhich includes names like Epoch, WorldCom, Corning, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packardenjoyed just over 63 percent growth in revenues in the first half of 2000.
Growing at a 57 percent pace over the same period were the providers of Internet applications such as Web consulting, commerce and multimedia applications, development software, search-engine software, online training, and databases. Some of the companies in this sector are Microsoft, Adobe, Accenture, Oracle, SAP, and Organic. Topping even this stunning growth pace were Internet intermediaries such as online travel agents, brokerages, portal/content providers, ad brokers, advertisers, and content aggregators, with a 103 percent surge over the period. These are companies like Yahoo!, Charles Schwab, Commerce One, ZDNet, and DoubleClick.
Finally, we have the Internet commerce firms, which enjoyed 62 percent growth in the first half of 2000, despite the crash in their stock values. These are the e-tailers, manufacturers selling online, fee/ subscription-based companies, airlines selling tickets online, and Net entertainment. Among the names in this group are Target, Amazon.com, Southwest Airlines, Dell, and Road Runner Sports.
The stock market shakeout was even more pronounced in the second half of 2000, as the Internet Economy slowed along with the rest of the economy. Even so, the more subdued growth rate in the Internet Economy was still far from shabby. In addition, according to the report, the Internet Economy directly supported more than three million workers.12