When I am bewildered with where technology is taking us I like to go back in time to read business articles from 25 years ago to see what people thought was novel that we now find commonplace.
Below is the unedited copy of an article that ran in the NY Times on August 24, 2000. No byline was given.
"Aug 23 -- US online retail giant Amazon.com will launch its French site next Tuesday with a gala evening on boats anchored in the Seine outside the new French national library, the company said Wednesday.
Amazon founder and managing director Jeff Bezos will come over from the United States to unveil the French version of the site, to be called Amazon.fr and developed by Amazon.fr chairman Denis Terrien.
The launch will be celebrated on 11 boats anchored on the Seine beside the new French national library, with the guest list a Who's Who of the French online scene.
Amazon has kept its French project shrouded in secrecy, and although it announced the date on Wednesday it is still keeping details of just what, apart from books, it will be offering for sale.
Amazon.com started life in the United States as an online bookshop in 1995 but has since expanded to include music, video, toys, beauty products, medicines, gifts, online auctions, sports goods and home improvement materials.
French online book sales currently comprise only about 0.3-0.5 percent of the market, compared with 5.4 percent in the United States, but Amazon is hoping for a repeat of the rapid growth seen by its British and German operations in the past year."
The notion that the “online scene” in France has a “Who’s Who” shows a younger reader how novel the internet was in 2000.
The stats buttress the infancy of eCommerce: .3-.5 percent of books were sold online in France then. Today roughly a quarter of all books in Europe and nearly half of books in the US are sold online.
If you were reading this at the time, you would have been struck at the rapid pace of change. You might not have seen that by August of 2000, the market for internet-based companies was already spiraling.
In 2000 there were 429 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), with nearly 500 the year before. By the next year, that number would be cut to just over 100. By October of 2002, the market had lost 3/4th of its value from the peak. It would not be until 2015 that broad market capitalization returned to the peak of the dot com boom.
Are we in for another crash driven by AI-fueled irrational exuberance?
Some analysts are concerned that current price-to-book value ratios are higher than they were in March of 2000. Of course, the productivity gain potential from AI could far surpass the shifts from brick and mortar to online retail.
To be clear, I have no idea what is going to happen to the market.
But what this dusty article on Amazon’s French market entry showed me is that while stock indices will rise and fall, the underlying technology that drove the market peaks and valleys can quickly be subsumed by the masses. Amazon is still in France (and 21 other countries).
Markets swing, but technology is a rachet.
Moreover, I can’t imagine AI, that is to say, content generation of words with still and moving images, will go anywhere but up in the long-term.
Think about it. If models can create cheap videos of real-looking people advertising real-world products and services, do you really think that is going to go away?
The only question is how it goes forward and how we choose to participate, or not, in its propagation.
Are you interested in these questions? Do you feel like you “have to” figure out AI for your business but you aren’t sure you feel good about it? As always, reach out to a Kasvaa advisor to discuss your business and technology growth plan.