 income ($2.9 billion VS. $25.6 million)" [30]. Internet-related service companies also fared well for a short time. Two companies, Whittman-Hart and USWeb/CKS, merged in 1999 to form a company called marchFIRST. Whittman-Hart was the older, dating back to 1984; it had, however, discovered the Web and jumped on the bandwagon. The market capitalization of marchFIRST rose to $14 billion as the company spent money prodigiously, opening offices, furnish- ing them lavishly, and hiring young Web designers in anticipation of business that never arrived. This too was characteristic behavior of the era. When it lost $6.8 billion on revenues of $213 million in 2000, the only question was whether shareholders' money was vanishing faster than its employees' jobs. It failed shortly thereafter; its market capitalization in 2002 was approximately zero. AOL itself was unusual in one respect. When its market capitalization was still high, in January 2000, it acquired an old-line business, Time Warner Inc., creating AOL Time Warner. Its market capitalization was twice Time Warner's, but its shareholders accepted 55% of the combined company's equity. The mar- riage was a rocky one. By 2003, AOL's core business of dial-up Internet access was in severe decline, the Time Warner part of the company was clearly in con- trol again, and "AOL" was dropped from the corporate name. Had AOL remained a stand-alone company, no doubt its market capitalization would have been a small fraction of Time Warner's, whose own diversified media business was doing better. But because it had monetized its stock by merging with Time Warner, AOL's shareholders were left with far more than most other dotcom investors. Any number of dotcoms could, at their peak, have monetized their market capitalization by purchasing large, profitable old-line corporations. Hardly any did. The Great Telecom Meltdown Carrier Hotels Created Too Much Room at the Inn The first corporate Web servers were, most likely, located in their company's data centers. As the Web caught on 