The search for cool

The magic ingredient in any major technology wave is the open acceptance on the part of users of new software or hardware. After the dot-com bust, end-users and the development community were both so disillusioned that they weren't interested in anything new, and coolness carried little weight. That was what prompted me to retire for a few years and go back to school. I wasn't interested in starting a new venture against that mood of negativity. Now for the first time since mid-2000, people are actively looking for new things to do on the Internet. Its easy to dismiss the mania of tens of thousands of bloggers, but there are tens of millions of users of blogging and other user data-sharing systems online in America alone. Of course there will be excesses, but trying to sell new tech when nobody is listening is like pushing on a string. It is only during adoption waves that the next set of major companies are built.