Dot Com

We’ve seen the Black Monday and the Japanese Asset Bubble in previous posts. When Black Monday happened, I was 2 years old and had no clue about prices, stocks et. al. When Japanese asset bubble burst… I didn’t have property in the Japanese markets. But I am surely aware of the Dot Com burst and I did see people around me get affected.

The IT Bubble was the period from 1995 – 2000 where IT stocks saw their valuations rocket through the sky.

Companies were seeing their stock prices shoot up if they simply added an “e-” prefix to their name and/or a “.com” to the end, which one author called “prefix investing.

A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, market confidence that the companies would turn future profits, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an environment in which many investors were willing to overlook traditional metrics such as P/E ratio in favor of confidence in technological advancements.

And hence the bubble. There were several reasons for the bubble to burst

• The Y2K bug got resolved. So most companies were equipped enough for sometime and hence, spends decreased
• Massive million dollar sell orders got processed incidentally at the same time, triggering price collapses and panic
• Adverse findings of US Vs Microsoft for monopoly

Good reads (this and this and this)

The offshore model

Much of Indian software companies thrive on software exports and outsourcing. The concept of the offshore model was first fully implemented by the much tainted figure of Satyam Computers’ founder, B. Ramalinga Raju.

In 1987, he founded Satyam Computer along with his brother B. Rama Raju and brother-in-law D.V.S. Raju, taking the company public four years later. That year, he won his first offshore contract from U.S. tractor maker John Deere & Co.

The Hyderabad-based start-up had signed up its first major offshore customer in June 1991, applied to VSNL for a dedicated satellite link in August that year. Using this link, Satyam wanted to execute a re-engineering contract, worth $1 million, for John Deere by remotely working on Deere’s IBM mainframes located in Chicago

For proof of concept, Satyam rented a house across the street from the development centre of its first Fortune 500 customer and named it Little India. Staffed by 10 pioneering engineers, Little India connected to John Deere through a 64 kbps satellite link. The engineers weren’t allowed direct interaction with their customers, and they worked only at night to simulate the way offshore engineers would do their jobs.

The project was implemented successfully. John Deere executives were also convinced, and the global delivery model was born – a model that created significant performance and cost benefits.