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2026/06/14 #

DotCom vs DotAI

I was just looking at some stock charts way zoomed out to see as much historical context as possible, and wondered what it looked like for some prominent companies that were around for the dotcom era of the web, both for hardware and software.

Cisco
Cisco
Microsoft
Microsoft
Intel
Intel
Micron
Micron

You can really see the similarity in the massive uptick around the year 2000, and then the current moment. Microsoft was famously not that hot on the internet back then, and so there isn‘t much of a bump, but the hardware companies definitely were, and that‘s very clear for Cisco, who made much of the networking equipment back then.

It sort of makes you go yikes, but it doesn‘t mean necessarily it‘s going to crash anytime soon, in fact I think it‘s unlikely to go that way until there are some more IPOs, but it‘s worth keeping these graphs in mind.

How best to set yourself up for the long road ahead is the big question that nobody knows the answer to. #

All parts swappable

Marc Andreesen was on the Latent Space Podcast recently. He‘s best known for being co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser to display inline images, and for being the founder of Netscape. There‘s a great bit midway through where he talks about his roots in unix programming and the Unix Mindset.

I started out working on unix systems back in university in the early 2000s, and in my first tech job managing a linux render farm in a visual effects company. Up until that point I‘d only used Windows systems, but having hands on experience it was clear to me very quickly how great these systems were for building and hacking on software.

What‘s cool about this clip is Marc takes all the unix concepts, everything being a file, the shell and being able to easily connect programs together, and he brings all these notions into the modern agentic era, explaining how they underpin all the developments we are now seeing AI.

It‘s all files, and everything is swappable. #

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