$NAS100 On the eve of the 2000 tech bubble burst, the industry faced a similar paradox: a severe mismatch between capital expenditure and cash flow. At that time, there was no mature virtualization technology; if you wanted to build a website, you had to buy Sun servers, Cisco routers, and EMC storage devices. These devices were very expensive. Bandwidth was also very costly, requiring high long-term service fees based on peak usage. Open-source software had not yet risen. Databases had to be purchased from Oracle, middleware from IBM, and each licensing fee was a heavy burden. Not to mention the human costs at the time. Without automation deployment tools, companies had to hire many administrators to manually configure servers. On the revenue side, cash flow was very slow. User base was small, payment channels were few, and advertising logic was primitive. Do you think there was overbuilding back then? Looking over a decade, compared to the booming industries that followed, those infrastructure investments were just a drop in the bucket, absolutely not overbuilt. When viewed in the context of those one or two years, startups relied on financing to survive, and a single wave would overturn the entire industry. A thousand sails pass the wrecked boat, and ten thousand trees bloom before the sickly tree. By 2006, AWS launched (pay-as-you-go, elastic scaling), open-source software rose (Linux, MySQL, etc.), fiber broadband reached homes, modern advertising and online payment systems were established, and the industry finally achieved cash flow break-even. On infrastructure that was sufficiently cheap, more exciting business models than initially envisioned emerged. The sustainable development of an industry cannot be premised on always winning by selling shovels. Either upstream and downstream fully compete with a sufficiently large market space, or upstream fully compete and downstream provides value-added services. Otherwise, the industry chain is inverted. You get paid handsomely, while downstream customers borrow to make a living—that makes no sense. #Gate广场五月交易分享