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Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
311 points (98.7% liked)
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Sooooooo, do people not remember the dot com bubble burst? Yes the internet still exists, but the companies that led the burst aren't.
Remember the pet food commercial with the sock puppet?
Or the super hero who was obviously superman, but for legal reasons wasn't superman who saved you money from travel by sticking you on his back and flying you places?
Yeeeaaaahhhh........those don't exist anymore.
Hell, even the big names like Juno and Compuserve are gone. Is AOL even still a company? ICQ is dead. Yahoo still exists, but only because they got bought by Verizon. Altavista, Ask Jeeves are both gone.
So yeah, some companies will survive the AI bubble, just as Google survived the dot com bubble. But the majority of the big names from 1998 do not exist post 2002.
Do these countless companies NOT see this?
We don't know if this bubble is going to be more like the dot-com bubble where the bubble burst but left useful things behind, or if it's going to be like the NFT bubble that left nothing useful behind.
As for whether the companies see this or not, of course they do. But, what are they going to do, go out of business intentionally before the bubble pops? It's really the investors who don't seem to see it. Why do they keep pumping money into the companies that are obviously ridiculously overvalued?
Western companies tend to chase short term profits at the expense of the long term.
So disappointing.
Aside from whether these companies see simularities with the dot com bubble, nobody knows for sure when the bubble will burst nor what policies will help you get to the other side unharmed. If for example their shoe business is not performing well right now, they might already not survive the economic downturn that'd hit them if the bubble bursts. It is definitely possible that this company is run by blind idiots, but it could also be imperfect human beings trying to keep their workers employed.