So, who saw that Panorama, then?
Personally, I went to bed halfway through. This is partly because I'm a lazy bastard, but mainly because I kept shouting at the telly, which was annoying my wife (this is not a novel experience for me).
For those of you who didn't see it, the programme purported to blow the lid off the over-inflated dotcom frenzy, fearlessly exposing the hollowness of its claims by, er, getting a few people to say slightly daft things.
It has to be said that some of the people they interviewed were a bit, well, poor - by no means all of them, but there were a couple that had a distinct odour of cash-in merchants. Either the programme-makers didn't do their research very well, or a lot of people smelt a stitch-up coming and wouldn't talk to them.
Some of the interviewees really did dig their own graves. Who's going to invest in a company whose founders cheerfully admit that they're only in it for the IPO?
We've been struggling to build up this industry for years. Well, you've all been struggling to build it up, and I've been sitting on the sidelines saying "hmm, very nice, but what about the fulfilment?" - but I feel a kind of paternal interest.
It's just so irritating to see the rest of the world catch on, and then start slagging it off. We spend years in the "It'll never work" stage, and then leapfrog the "What a marvellous idea" stage and take a one-way ticket to the "Ha, ha, ha, the bubble's burst" stage. What's been achieved has been achieved because of the hard work of certain people, often in the face of a lot of sneering. For those sneerers to tell us now that the net's over-hyped is a bit hard to swallow.
The one good thing about the programme was that part of it was filmed at our awards.
They wanted to interview me at the awards, but couldn't find me. It would have been nice to put the other side of the story. But to be honest, on that particular night, I might not have done too much to counter the impression that our industry is full of pissed-up chancers.
In-depth analysis: has Panaroma's bubble burst?
So, who saw that Panorama, then?
Personally, I went to bed halfway through. This is partly because I'm a lazy bastard, but mainly because I kept shouting at the telly, which was annoying my wife (this is not a novel experience for me).
For those of you who didn't see it, the programme purported to blow the lid off the over-inflated dotcom frenzy, fearlessly exposing the hollowness of its claims by, er, getting a few people to say slightly daft things.
It has to be said that some of the people they interviewed were a bit, well, poor - by no means all of them, but there were a couple that had a distinct odour of cash-in merchants. Either the programme-makers didn't do their research very well, or a lot of people smelt a stitch-up coming and wouldn't talk to them.
Some of the interviewees really did dig their own graves. Who's going to invest in a company whose founders cheerfully admit that they're only in it for the IPO?
We've been struggling to build up this industry for years. Well, you've all been struggling to build it up, and I've been sitting on the sidelines saying "hmm, very nice, but what about the fulfilment?" - but I feel a kind of paternal interest.
It's just so irritating to see the rest of the world catch on, and then start slagging it off. We spend years in the "It'll never work" stage, and then leapfrog the "What a marvellous idea" stage and take a one-way ticket to the "Ha, ha, ha, the bubble's burst" stage. What's been achieved has been achieved because of the hard work of certain people, often in the face of a lot of sneering. For those sneerers to tell us now that the net's over-hyped is a bit hard to swallow.
The one good thing about the programme was that part of it was filmed at our awards.
They wanted to interview me at the awards, but couldn't find me. It would have been nice to put the other side of the story. But to be honest, on that particular night, I might not have done too much to counter the impression that our industry is full of pissed-up chancers.
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