 CNet. More Monday morning quarterbacking on the bandwidth glut and the failure of Global Crossing. Why not pile on? My view is that these fiber optic bandwidth suppliers never had a chance once the .Coms began to fail. But, why did the .Coms fail?
It's pretty clear that the .Com collapse was more complex than simply the deflation of overhyped stock values. It was really the result of a cash crunch caused by the costs associated with the delivery of centralized services. It isn't enough to merely be able to deliver services to hundreds of millions of people, it has to be done at a profit. Centralized Web applications can't and won't ever make that possible.
These companies were lying to themselves. They felt, that once they reached a certain scale, they would be able to enjoy cost reductions (scale economies). Also, pundits like Gilder promised even lower costs for centralized services over time due to the bandwidth doubling rate fiber optic firms were making possible. However, these cost savings never materialized due the problems and costs associated with building ever more complex applications able to handle millions of users. Also, the bandwidth glut that would lower connectivity costs never arrived due to political factors associated with last mile connections (we are now doubling bandwidth at a mere 4-5 year rate).
Even the companies that got centralized apps to scale to millions of users at a reasonable cost (most failed, this is a black art) found it almost impossible to make money consistently. Even if the advertising market returned to its pre-bubble levels, they would still be in trouble. Why? They are caught in a paradox: they can't make money unless they charge people to use their services and if they charge for use, usage declines radically. This reduction in usage means they will be less likely to attract mass market advertisers (lower revenue from advertising) and the meager economies of scale they enjoyed evaporates.
The answer to this paradox is to decentralize service delivery by delivering Web applications to the desktop, where the user of the service pays for the compute cycles. Further, use of P2P file delivery to populate these distributed Web apps with content provides another means of cost reduction. P2P enabled apps leverage the bandwidth that end-users have paid for. Without the ability to shift costs to end-users, Internet-based businesses will continue to fail or at best break-even. Everything that is currently done centrally today on the Web can be done in a decentralized architecture for less expense and with higher impact (imagine a media rich, glossy version of Yahoo that loads as fast as the current text only version). Further, the higher quality and usefulness of decentralized apps makes it possible to charge people for these apps on a software model (people will pay for fewer better applications).
Global Crossing, WorldCom and the other big bandwidth suppliers never had a chance. The companies they built their businesses around were destined for destruction, en masse.
9:51:27 AM 
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