There are still plenty of thriving dot.coms in my neighborhood, and no shortage of millionaires running them. Most of them are not well known, but just filling some important niche in the industry.

The ones that went bust were the high-profile ones that you read about in the news. It is worth remembering that what normally got a dot.com in the news was extravagant spending and going after silly markets, so it's not too surprising that the ones that were widely known were most of the ones that went bust.

Other companies filled their shoes. As an example, after Webvan went under, the local grocery stores like Safeway went quietly into the web delivery business. They're doing all right with it. Since they already had stores full of food, they didn't have to spend hundreds of millions building food warehouses like Webvan, something that should have occurred to a lot of people.