Opportunity knocks after a bubble pops
[T]he web bubble took a bunch of humanities undergraduates and convinced them to become Perl programmers and HTML jocks. And so, when the web burst around 2000, all the dumb bosses who are shipping 90-pound bags of pet food saying it's the future of the web went back home. And then these workers were sitting around with servers at 10 cents on the dollar and office space going begging. And they hired each other to build real things, which we call Web 2.0 and it was pretty cool. — Cory Doctorow