You can see the logical flaw at work, whatever you think about valuations. In every bubble, it is possible that a few firms actually will become platforms. But most will not. Lots of firms will develop useful tools, but never become platforms. There's nothing wrong with that. But it is not a reason to give unrealistic valuations to "revenue-free" companies that might someday discover a revenue model.
That is not to minimize the legitimate new developments in Internet software. Collaboration, as it turns out, is a big deal, in fact far bigger than even suppliers of business collaboration tools might have suspected. A major shift in computing architecture to "cloud" mechanisms will lead to a whole new list of industry leaders. We just don't know who they are, just yet.
Still, failure rates are high in the venture business, high in the start-up business and won't be any different this time around.
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