.Con

I've been reading .con, a history of the .com boom and bust. It takes place at pretty much the time I was leaving university and going to work in the web industry. Indeed one of my old CVs mentioned having 'a ringside seat' on the whole affair.

I'd love to be able to talk to myself as I was then. I remember thinking two things

a) The .com bubble was clearly ridiculous and couldn't last
b) Internet business was the only way to do business

Clearly these positions would have been hard to reconcile, but I'm pretty sure that's what I was thinking. It was a kind of 'all those .com's are dumb, but this web thing is really going to work'. Clicks and Bricks was the buzzword for that state of mind I seem to recall.

In my defence the company I was working with at the time made a point of not dealing with .coms. We worked for real businesses who paid cash, not stock options, and most of the projects I worked on made money for someone - often a lot. So perhaps I did know what I was doing - but I doubt it. If I'd been working somewhere with stronger Kool Aid I think I'd have swallowed it all...