The Tulip Mania and Online Businesses

I had the opportunity to be enlightened on the concept on the Tulip Mania, or tulipomania. This phenomenon happened in the late 1636 until mid 1637. The contract price for tulip bulbs skyrocketed in a very short amount of time, and then suddenly collapsed. In February 1637, the tulip mania was at its peak and the price for one bulb was more than 10 times the income of a skilled craftsman in a year. This is what experts call the speculative bubble, or economic bubble, where there is a huge difference between asset prices and the intrinsic value of products. However, in a few days time, the price dropped drastically and continued to decline.

Such a phenomenon had happened in the last several years. Networking businesses/scams like the Pyramid, had boomed and spread like wildfire. Thousands of people were left bankrupt due to high profit expectations which eventually went downhill in a matter of days. These financial failures would have been avoided had the concept of e-commerce surpassed the popularity of financial networking earlier on. One thought that comes to mind is the popularity of social networking sites that caused a huge influx of clientele for the said social networks. Other online businesses started to bloom as online interactivity reached an all-time high. Although these online business opportunities did not spring overnight, I have a feeling they are here to stay. They have low maintenance cost, virtually no overhead, and availability for 24/7 monitoring. For some businesses like the Australian Business Directory, administrators can monitor their business from anywhere around the world. And partnership can be had with literally hundreds of thousands of other online businesses. Such is the beauty of having your business plug in to the internet.