WayTooEarly: The Year Of

One of my favorite recurring features in Fred Wilson's terrific blog, A_VC, is the VC cliche of the week. For this way too early investor, the cliche that sucks me in time after time is "But this is the year of %hotitem:" For us geeks, %hotitem instantiates the cliche. I've seen dozens of such instantiations: Network, Voice, Security, Windows, ebooks and so on. I'll talk about a few of them from time to time.
   The year of the Network started being touted around 1980. At that time, a mostly forgotten San Antonio company called Datapoint had developed a local networking technology called Arcnet, which was going to lead to all the word processors being connected. I did some work with them, but never invested (they were public). In 1982, however,I did invest in Sytek, which built the first broadband local network and actually wrote NetBios with IBM. General Instruments, which was the leader in cable boxes, actually bought half the company, since Sytek's technology worked on unused cable channels. Even IBM was a key OEM of the technology. But that was a little too early for the world to want cable modems - after all, the web hadn't yet been invented. We did make a little money on Sytek because of the R&D tax credit structure of the way we invested.
   Then 3COM and Ungerman-Bass began making Ethernet networking affordable. And Novell made software to make it desirable. So, from 1986 to 1989, each year was going to be "The year of the Network" - the time when the hockey stick portion of the sales curve would happen. By that time, I had turned to some other technology's purported year of.
   Last year, it was the year of Web2.0. It seems that this year is either the year of mobile, or the year of video (or maybe of mobile video). But I've learned that the phrase is a great tipoff that, while the consultants and journalists who are touting it may see the future, they can't easily predict the timing. So you better have that 6th P of my last post if you're going to invest based on it being The Year of..

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