The dotcom bubble burst because the development of the internet could not keep up with expectations, even though investors were correct in principle with their assumption it would generate swaths of wealth. For AI the hope is that AI itself will start to push its own development and adoption sooner rather than later, so the timing issue that killed dotcom investors might instead make AI investors insanely rich. That's why we're still seeing heaps of money getting dumped into it.
Obviously there were plays from the dotcom era that just were not going to work on the timeframes expected because the rest of the infrastructure also hadn't caught up - not just internet, but shipping in general took a long time to catch up, and Amazon having to basically build their own logistics empire shows that ecommerce just wasn't going to be able to be The Thing at the speed those investments required.
But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.
Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.
But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.
Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.
Young people and vanilla users might only see "the internet" as something that primarily happens on smartphones, but there are entire industries out there dependent on software that doesn't even exist for mobile phones yet still requires an internet connection. Smartphone internet is primarily an end-user/casual consumer thing. Sure there is a lot of money in that too if you can capture millions of users, but the real easy money is in B2B. And everyone in the dotcom era correctly saw that coming, but the digitalisation simply happened too slow for most industries because there was a whole generation of people who grew up without computers and who didn't mind wasting hours everyday on something senseless.
