Times may change but when it comes to internet euphoria some things seem to stay the same. It is seven years since Bill Gates warned the Davos crowd that the World Wide Web had become a magnet for speculative investment. “People are jumping into it like it’s a gold rush,” he said at the World Economic Forum gathering in 1999.
That same month, Rupert Murdoch also cautioned that internet companies were not worth as much as the stock market assumed, adding that he would “certainly not be making takeovers of large, or overcapitalised companies”.
