so you ve just bought your first personal computer, you ve brought it home from the store, you re unpacking it, and then comes the moment of truth. if you ve just bought your first personal computer, this show is for you. computers were in 1990 a disconnected device. it was a brick, right? that sat in your house and let you do amazing things that you d never been able to do before, but it was essentially a productivity tool. now that we have all these very powerful tools, we re still islands, and we re still not really connecting these people using these powerful tools together. apple was in a period of decline. steve jobs quit in kind of a temper tantrum in 1985. and he went off and started a company called next. after he left, there was a sequence of pretty boring, unimaginative corporate leadership that followed him. so why did you leave apple? well, why did i leave apple? i was asked to leave. yeah, i was asked to leave apple. i was planning on spe
bid. ebay really changed everything, and not because what they were offering was so incredible and revolutionary. essentially what they were doing was they were automating the middleman. 600 million hits a month. that s right. that s a lot of people. that s right. how do you stop the unscrupulous? problems like that are really very, very rare on ebay. it s all based on trust. one thing ebay pioneered is that we rate each other so that future transaction participants can see whether you re a good person to deal with or not. it s in your financial interest to be looked up to and respected as a trustworthy transactional partner. on nbc news in-depth tonight, we re going to talk about the superstars of the stock market, those red-hot internet stocks. companies that in some cases didn t even exist a few years ago are now trading in the stratosphere. the whole dot-com bubble of the late 90s was based on this idea that what counted was not profit. what counted was eyeball
incredible and revolutionary. essentially what they were doing was they were automating the middleman. 600 million hits a month. that s right. that s a lot of people. that s right. how do you stop the unscrupulous? problems like that are really very, very rare on ebay. it s all based on trust. one thing ebay pioneered is that we rate each other so that future transaction participants can see whether you re a good person to deal with or not. it s in your financial interest to be looked up to and respected as a trustworthy transactional partner. on nbc news in-depth tonight, we re going to talk about the superstars of the stock market, those red-hot internet stocks. companies that in some cases didn t even exist a few years ago are now trading in the stratosphere. the whole dot-com bubble of the late 90s was based on this idea that what counted was not profit. what counted was eyeballs. if you could get enough people using your stuff, you would figure out a way organic
from that to make a profit. the daily volume, 3.7 million shares. we are almost a $2 billion company. people love these stocks. anything that has dot-com or net in its name, it goes like hot cakes. it s billed as the earth s biggest bookstore. not just the country s but the earth s. but you can t shop there unless you have a computer. it s a virtual bookstore. books, books, and more books. that s what they do at amazon.com. if you print the amazon.com catalog, it would be the size of seven new york city phone books. in the early 90s, jeff bezos looked at what the internet could be, and he decided that the internet could be anything. bezos started amazon.com at this modest ranch home in seattle in 1994. less than five years later, his idea of selling books on the internet has grown into a multibillion dollar business. the largest physical bookstores only carry about 175,000 titles.
accomplished, the highest and best use of his remaining years was to spend that money helping humanity. it was just a few months back, if your company ended in dot-com it was a good thing. but at the end of this brutal week on wall street, a lot of analysts think the internet bubble is ready to burst, and by this time next year, a huge number of those dot-coms might be dot gone. a year ago, investors were so eager to buy into the internet they were happily ignoring traditional measures of success. sales, profits and growth. but reality has now set in. these upstarts didn t have any income. they were saying, we are worth billions of dollars. where s your revenue? they didn t have any. when the venture capitalists stopped putting money in, you could time the bubble. you could say you know, if we all believe this fantasy, it works. if some of us stop believing, it s a prelude to its failure. most dot-com retail companies will be out of business by next