i was a bit too young to observe but has anyone here seen something similar when the internet craze came out?
1) Were public companies changing their names to reflect the "e"/"i"? If so which ones?
2) Isn't the "i" from iPhone/iMac taken from the word "internet"? Okay it's a product and not a company name, but where does the distinction starts/ends?
Could we expect an incoming "bPhone" (blockchain) or cPhone(crypto), dPhone(decentralized) .. it actually sounds cool, right?
Yes, during the dotcom boom you could see a spectrum of behaviour, including at one edge companies that were almost purely a scam, basically "We're going to do this perfectly ordinary business, but _Internet_ so give us piles of cash" and at the other conventional businesses that really were heavily Internet related and only tweaked how they described their existing Internet work or moved that to the top of a document, such as Microsoft or Google.
In the middle somewhere a good example is Be Incorporated. During the 1990s Jean-Louis Gassee had founded this startup with VC money to pursue a new operating system and basically prove Apple (who he'd previously worked for) wrong. By the end of the century JLG's funding was running out, the VCs didn't want any more risk, Apple had chosen to take back Steve Jobs instead of him, and it looked as though Be would go out of business shortly, but the dotcom book offered a "Hail Mary" play.
Be re-wrote its history and produced IPO paperwork that emphasised this as an Internet technology offering in the heart of the dotcom boom. Be's future was now in the promising (but it turns out in the end, totally irrelevant and now forgotten) Internet Appliance market, they pivoted from their previous work (developing a personal computer operating system nobody was using), they went from talking about TCP/IP as a specialist corner case few users would care about to prioritising it as the main focus of their system, and so on.
It didn't work, Be Inc. ceased business after burning all the IPO cash and laid off all its employees without shipping any significant new products. But without the dotcom boom, that would all have happened much earlier, when the VC money ran out. Ordinary people who foolishly purchased Be Inc. shares in the IPO or shortly afterwards lost their shirts, and the VCs got their money back.
I disagree with your use of the term 'foolish' in hindsight.
We can imagine an entirely reasonable alternate universe where, by pursuing this 'Internet Appliance' idea, they ended up inventing the formula for what in our universe became the iPad. Apple's success was far from guaranteed at this time too.
So they (Be, inc) passed the buck onto the general public, and let them shoulder the immense financial burden of their failures? That's pretty evil, extremely devious, a whole lot cowardly, and an astonishingly good move business-wise.
It would be evil if they had intended to fail. I assume they intended to succeed. It turned out that Linux won the server market, but it was entirely plausible that BeOS could have won instead. At the time, lots of well-funded startups used Solaris/SPARC web servers, and many used NT, so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that open source would win. BeOS had a lot to recommend it over Solaris, not to mention NT.
If they "passed the buck onto the general public, and let them shoulder the immense financial burden of their failures" that seems to me like the definition of an IPO.
On top of that everyone and their mother founded companies that did 'something with the internet' and all those companies had a '.com', 'e' or something similar in their names.
Personally, I feel like the 'i' was mainly popularised with the iPod.
I remember people saying "Only eMachines can do the internet. That's why they have 'e' in their name, duh!"
And remember "Dot Com Guy?" Some dude in Dallas who as a publicity stunt pledged to stay in his house for an entire year and just live off of stuff ordered online? Today, that's quaint. Back then the very notion of ordering a pizza on your computer was like flying cars.
The very first time I saw the idea of ordering something online, was when Sandra Bullock ordered pizza online in the 1995 movie The Net. I was just floored, like I couldn't grasp exactly how such a thing would work and how it could really be possible.
The web was just getting started, but there were lots of online services already, like Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc. so I kind of think people were ordering stuff online before websites existed - although my memory is hazy. Also, there were things in other countries besides the US - Minitel for instance?
I doubt we’ll see a mass market blockchain phone for two reasons:
1) blockchain adds overhead. Mobile is about efficiency
2) blockchains are only necessary for adversarial collaboration. Your phone is wholly owned and controlled by you, so there’s no need to host adversarial realities on it.
1) Light blockchain clients?
2) Umm really? Controlled by you? Not by Apple and Google who censor software (crypto as well) and such?
A bunch of companies are doing exactly that right now (can’t recall from the top of my head) and I honestly wish them all the best as the current walled garden situation is obscene.
ad 1) with a lot of people having more than one device, why not a block-chain app between just your devices to make sure information is shared between them correctly? It's all about finding a valid use-case, barely anyone does though.
> i was a bit too young to observe but has anyone here seen something similar when the internet craze came out?
Some, but because the money flowed differently it was more common to take successful business idea and start a new VC backed company with successful business + internet tacked on.
Existing companies were naming products with e/i, but again they got nothing close to the boost we are seeing right now with blockchain.
> has anyone here seen something similar when the internet craze came out?...Were public companies changing their names to reflect the "e"/"i"? If so which ones?
This is an age-old phenomenon. Why do you think there's a toy wagon called the "radio flyer"? Radio was the high tech product of its era, and planes...wow!
I was working then. As I recall, a lot of small companies did this. I can think of one public company that changed the name of a division, but not the whole company. I can't think of any public companies that recast themselves as internet companies this way; perhaps someone else can.
1) Were public companies changing their names to reflect the "e"/"i"? If so which ones?
2) Isn't the "i" from iPhone/iMac taken from the word "internet"? Okay it's a product and not a company name, but where does the distinction starts/ends?
Could we expect an incoming "bPhone" (blockchain) or cPhone(crypto), dPhone(decentralized) .. it actually sounds cool, right?