By the time you read this I will be a very very rich man.
Don't let envy lead you to begrudge me my good fortune. (Indeed, as a committed eco-socialist I will be donating a large part of my fortune to organic Cuban cigar manufacturers in return f
or a small tonnage of their stock).
I've earned this. I started working in new media almost on the very day the UK dotcom boom went bust. The sequence of events was this: 1) I turned up at the office; 2) Five uneventful seconds passed; 3) It all went pear-shaped. Some of my co-workers have never quite forgiven me for this - I still sometimes find the word "e-Jonah" written on my PC in yellow magic marker.
In short, I missed the days of gold-plated boardrooms, dress-down Fridays and dancing-girl Thursdays, Olympic-size swimming pools in the foyer and cocaine dispensers in the toilets.
Instead, my experience of working for a dotcom centred on huddling in corrugated shelters and scavenging salaries from the dustbin. Instead of illegal chemicals and belly dancers, our office entertainment centred on guessing who was going to be laid off next.
All that has changed. The good old days are coming back. The signs are obvious.
Google's much talked about flotation will apparently value the search engine company at
some $15 billion. As I've previously
noted, people are paying silly money for domain names again.
Dotcom Boom II is on its way. Sod working for a living. I'm going to become an imagineer.
Hopefully enough lessons have been learned to stave off Dotcom Crash II. Surely this time nobody will put money into something as monumentally stupid as
boo.com. (
Top tip: If you do want to invest in something like boo.com, save yourself time and effort by simply setting fire to your money and giving the ashes to strangers.)
As well as not giving your money to imagineers, there are other ways to prepare for the boom.
Firstly, immerse yourself in the language of e-commerce. Once you had to do an MBA to master this. Now you can become fluent without ever having to take flipcharts seriously, thanks to the magnificent Web Economy Bullshit Generator at
www.dack.com.
Thanks to this, I plan to "unleash cutting-edge convergence", "syndicate plug-and-play content" and "utilize distributed eyeballs" in an attempt to "drive out-of-the-box infomediaries" and "target viral web-readiness".
Reading that cost you nothing. When I'm an imagineering consultant that little lot will set you back about £1,500.
For an extra £5,000 I'll throw in a "mission statement", courtesy of the many automatic generators of such nonsense available online. There's one at
www.dilbert.com and a modified version at
web.mit.edu.
Rather than have to find all these resources yourself, one site has compiled a complete solution for all your e-business needs:
www.enormicom.com.
It provides a step-by-step guide to creating an e-brand, giving your venture a Singular Cohesive Action Moniker; an innovative, cutting-edge logo (a swoosh); and a three word tag line ("Complete sentences are so Q4 99").
There's even focus group research to back up each step. For instance, the name Similant (sadly the only option) received the following responses: "very strong customer focus"; "adapted to my needs"; "truly cares about its customers"; "global" - accurately reflecting the value of much focus group research.
The cleverest thing about the site is that it promotes a real web design company:
37signals.
Dotcommers have learned from the ridiculous mistakes of the past and are now prepared to laugh at them - and make capital from them.
Let the good times roll.
(Let's see, it probably took you three minutes to read that. Longer if you clicked the links. I'll round that up to my smallest billable unit, a week. So you owe me £2,800. Cash. Just practising.)
