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Virtual Golden Age to Near Extinction (or Not?)

When something seems too good to be true, well, it probably is. I suppose that doesn't mean that one shouldn't, at least, try. A fancy name seems a good way to start trying, as was the case in the sudden rise of the World Wide Web: Prodigy (Oh! My promising child!), CompuServe (We serve you computer connectivity! See what we did there...), Genie (Technology, it's magic!), AOL (Okay, acronyms are pretty lazy...but America OnLine -- We get you online, I guess.), and Delphi (We are the center of the technological world!).

What's most interesting in considering these huge service provider companies as dinosaurs - big, slow, extinct (mostly), cumbersome - is that the mere allusion seems to hint at the potential of waves of near extinction forthcoming. It will undoubtedly come to light in the future that new waves of convergence will prove previous providers’ technological structure obsolete, and make way for things like pesky little tiny mammals (small web businesses and providers) to come forth and evolve into giants, likely over and over again. 

So, it makes sense then that the big dinosaurs would continue to look for these tiny companies to adopt as part of the herd, as part of their evolution. “Survival of the fittest” requires change, not just of technology, but also in ways of thinking. Change cannot come from stagnation any more than evolution can come from a singular species hoping to survive through the ages. A lack of change is the equivalent of death.


And this perhaps speaks to Yahoo!’s (YahooOOoo! Weeeee!) success. Starting out as merely a search engine and morphing into a massive community, expanding the herd, i.e. diversifying. Diversification in biology allows for a greater hope of survival, especially in the way of mass extinctions, similar to the way that diversification of internet business will allow all internet companies to survive the next wave of the technological renaissance. It’s coming. Again. 

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