Week 5 Reflection

In week five we looked at the "dot com bubble" which I found interesting as I had never looked at it form a business perspective before.  I understood that a lot of the companies had failed but I never took the time to look into why they had failed.  Even with the short amount of time that we have looked into the reasons it struck me that one of the major reasons was the fervor of speculation.  It reminded me of the gold rush, a large amount of people rushing into a situation with very little knowledge about the situation but push themselves on because of the few people that had made money.  I always find it strange that such an important factor of our society can be manipulated to such a degree and cause such havoc, all because one sector of the market rose and fell so quickly.  Another interesting thing that I found out is the lack of business planning on the part of the businesses as well.  Many of the websites focused upon simply gathering as many visitors as possible but didn't think beyond that point.  The businesses never though to try and monetize the amount of visitors they gathered or they tried to maintain the large amount of visitors at a cost to the company.  Thus the company was operating at a loss with no real long term plan to try and turn that around.  It just bewilders me that people would do so much without a "real" plan that would account for things like this.  Why would you start a company without any real idea of how to try and make money with the business.  Of course there are all the dot com businesses that fell apart on purpose because of the greed, but that is a different side of the story.