"A guy I've known for years who recently left tobacco company R.J. Reynolds said an odd thing to me last week. He's about to roll his 401(k) assets into an IRA, where at last he'll have a pool of money to buy individual stocks. So what's the first thing he plans to buy? No dot bombs for him."
—Daniel Kadlec, "Down In Smoke," Time, February 12, 2000
I know, I know: I'm
way behind the curve on this one. You could say that, what with the Nasdaq's spectacular melt-down and dot-com companies crashing like so many Windows machines, 2000 was the year of the dot bomb. The Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, magazines, and other media tells me that "dot bomb" was used exactly once in 1999, while the related phrases "dot-bomb" and "dot.bomb" were used twice and once, respectively. In 2000, however, these phrases were used in over 250 stories.
The one use of "dot bomb" in 1999 also holds a clue to what may be the earliest use of this phrase: the book titled ".coms or .bombs: strategies for profit in e-business," written by Mark Layton and published in 1999:
"Daisytek CEO Mark Layton discusses his perspective on the evolution of the e-commerce in his new book, '.coms or .bombs: strategies for profit in e-business.'"
—Karen Franse, "E-Business Success: Dot Coms Or Dot Bombs?", VAR Business, November 8, 1999
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