Why Did Forest Industry Dot.Coms Fail‪?‬

Abstract In late 1999, partly as a result of a softening in the U.S. economy, the Internet-based technology sector crashed. Before the crash, the forest sector was rife with business-to-business forest sector exchanges attempting to cash in on the dot.com explosion. The boom-bust history of dot.com exchanges is now facing scrutiny, criticism, and reflection. In this article, we examine the factors that contributed to the bursting of the dot.com bubble from the exchange provider point-of-view. Respondents suggest that dot.com failure resulted from inappropriate business models, a tradition-bound industry that was not prepared for large-scale technology adoption, and a sense that the human element would be replaced by computers.