Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Several years ago, when I taught at a business school, some colleagues and I hit upon an investment strategy: Figure out the hot and trendy industry among MBA’s, wait a year, then sell those companies short.
If you would have followed this strategy, here are the companies and industries you would have sold short and when: (i) e-commerce in 1999, (ii) business-to-business e-commerce in 2001, (iii) the Segway (motor scooter) in 2002 (yes, for a time many MBAs thought that this was the new new thing – the product that would “transformationally change” the way we live and work), (iv) real estate in 2006, and (v) solar companies in 2007. Although I haven’t researched it, I’m pretty sure that the same strategy would tell you to sell “plastics” short in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile, in picking hot, new industries government seems to be about two or three years behind MBAs. For instance, Solyndra received its loan guarantees in 2009, and in May, 2010, President Obama made his famous visit to the company.
Although I no longer teach MBAs, I have several friends who still do. So what’s the current hot, new industry among MBAs? Without question, “social networking.” However, even this industry is starting to lose cachet. In terms of trendiness among MBAs, it probably hit its peak about a year or two ago.
Two weeks ago, the CEO of LinkedIn published an essay in Fortune Magazine. I couldn’t help but notice how much he sounds like the MBAs I taught in 1999 – and how much the promises of social networking sound like the promises that were made about e-commerce in 1999. Here are some passages:
The technology revolution has upended industries and career paths at an unprecedented pace. Economic transitions that once took centuries (think agrarian to industrial) or decades (think industrial to information), are now taking place over only a handful of years. Classic economic theory would suggest that when Amazon overturns Borders or Netflix sinks Blockbuster, productivity gains manifested by these next generation companies should enable the displaced employees to find work elsewhere and add incremental economic value to the system. That’s clearly not happening.
We need to make the pace of technological change work to fix the same problem that it helped create. This will come through the development of an economic graph.
Most of us are by now familiar with the value generated by the social graph concept popularized by Facebook, the professional graph developed by LinkedIn, and the interest graph implicitly manifested by Twitter. What if we were able to extend that thinking to the economy itself and developed an economic graph?
Today, President Obama will visit the headquarters of LinkedIn. He might want to be careful about overselling the promise of the social-networking industry. He might want to temper any claims about the future success of LinkedIn.
- Comment (17)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (0)
Comments:
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Yikes. Isn't, er, Ricochet kind of like a social networking site for conservatives?
Aug '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Yeah, but you aren't asking me to recommend you to anyone.
Feb '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Kiss of death for LinkedIn.
Jul '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
President Pick o' Doom is visiting LinkedIn? Time to close out my account. Good thing I have nothing more invested than my time and a bogus email address.
Aug '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
I think you mean "cachet." "Cache" means something like "stash." Of course it isn't good to lose that either
Oct '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
I see it as more like Tom Sawyer's fence - we users are paying Rob and Peter to fill their site so they can sell their ads.
(I was thinking of Guido Fawkes' "Jonah Brown" series when I first saw this. An early example.)
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Oh no. Are we about to lend $500 million to Linked In?
Apr '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Linked-In's IPO went nowhere. Time for a federal loan to keep this winner afloat.
Feb '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
When I first saw this headline, I thought it said "pet rocks," not pets.com."
LinkedIn does have that quality that you feed and care for it, and it just sits there.
Mar '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
e-commerce didn't work out? What about Amazon? What about Internet Banking?
LinkedIn is pretty good, actually - it, or the next version of it, will stay around in some form or other. But after the hype wears off and Mr Obama is writing his next volume of memoirs - the one where he brought millions of green jobs to America, we are all driving around in electric cars or travelling on high-speed rail.
Aug '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
I teach in an MBA program and I completely agree . Some of my colleagues use LinkedIn as a means of generating discussions between students and alums, but the results have been quite mediocre. However, LinkedIn has one redeeming virtue--appropriately used, it becomes a self-updating rolodex which I find incredibly useful.
Sep '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
LinkedIn is beyond lame. Their newer competitors, however, could prove to be more interesting.
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
David Williamson:
LinkedIn is pretty good, actually...
How do you figure? I've never understood the point.
Jun '11
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Linkedin has gotten me s couple of jobs, one during this recession that's not a recession. The CS(content strategy) group I belong to there isn't bad at all. I doubt Solandra was ever so useful to "ham'n egger" such as myself...
Dec '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
LinkedIn has been written off about a dozen times since 2003, and yet it still keeps plugging along. From a business perspective, to boot. I recommend you compare its profitability to that of similar sites.
To your larger point, though: Is social media a tulip craze? I would argue it is not. The "hype" part of it was, I think, part of the transformational web talk that inflated the late 20th cent. internet bubble.
I recognize that part of the mystery of bubbles is that people that are in them can't see it. And I work for a social media company called QuantiaMD serving validated health professionals, so I am ripe for having this blind spot. But the different between Pets.com and QuantiaMD (and other companies like it) as that we are, in fact, quite profitable. So is LinkedIn.
Jul '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
I just got a $10 an hour raise off of my LinkedIn profile. Im also being stalked by several women who found me on LinkedIn. Free Money and Women what else could you ask for?
Was that a shark?
Sep '10
Re: Is LinkedIn our Decade’s Pets.com? Today, Obama visits the Company Headquarters
Today, President Obama will visit the headquarters of LinkedIn. He might want to be careful about overselling the promise of the social-networking industry.
Friedrich Hayek, call your office: The Information President is stuck in a Do-Loop.