The Tomorrow Times, Taiwan's first-ever online newspaper, announced yesterday that it was shutting up shop. The closure marks not only the early death of an Internet newspaper, but also the bursting of Taiwan's Internet bubble in step with international trends. The Tomorrow Times, which vowed to "let you see today what is going to be in tomorrow's newspapers," has sent its readers a final message: Taiwan is in the middle of a dotcom winter.
Publisher Jan Hung-tze (
The Tomorrow Times will not be the last Taiwanese Internet company to fail. Many Internet businesses whetted investor's appetites by posing as high-growth enterprises and dangling the prospect of small investments reaping high returns. Internet stocks also skyrocketed after some high-profile mergers, to the extent of causing an overflow of capital at Internet firms. As Internet companies fanned out cash to vie for top talent, the new "Internet nobility" saw their assets grow a hundredfold and people scrambling to take positions in the market. This was how the US built its "new economy." The Taiwanese government has also tried to follow suit by prioritizing the development of the "knowledge-based economy."
The global Internet bubble was a result of believing that the new medium suspended the realities of doing business. What can be said about an industry where the companies were actually admired for their rate of spending investors' money while profits were thought to be irrelevant, except that there was a monstrous failure of rationality. Now the Internet bubble has burst and dotcoms are a drag on the market, dragging down even computer businesses and triggering a serious slump in international stock markets over the past year.
The Tomorrow Times' closure is a major blow to Taiwan's development of a knowledge-based economy, but it can also be a positive warning sign. If the trend that has fueled the Internet bubble is not corrected immediately, Taiwan's Internet businesses will suffer an even longer, more devastating failure.
The Tomorrow Times' experience has provided quite a few lessons about a knowledge-based economy.
One, whatever the potential of the Internet, business plans have to take economic realities into account. The nonsense that expansion is all and a revenue stream an afterthought is just that. The "new economy" behaves, unsurprisingly, much like the old one.
Two, many traditional industries have become sunset industries no investor is interested in after they lost the ability to innovate. But if traditional industries can strengthen their research and development and make good use of new knowledge, new technologies and new sales techniques, they can also become part of a knowledge-based economy.
At the Legislative Yuan on Tuesday, Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) announced a plan to pump NT$36 billion within five years into developing a knowledge-based economy. The closure of the Tomorrow Times came as a timely warning sign. The government should encourage the high-tech and highly imaginative Internet industry to become more market-oriented. As for traditional industries, the government should give them a new shot of life by means of knowledge and technology. Taking care of both the technology and traditional sectors is the only correct path for Taiwan in developing a knowledge-based economy.
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