No slowdown for the U.S. tech industry
The rest of the economy may be going to hell, but American tech companies are still going strong. Last week’s article in Network World featured some of my thoughts on why tech is holding up, and whether we’re headed for a repeat of the early 2000’s recesssion that started the dot.com crash.
Why might this downturn different from the dot.com days? From the article:
“Back then, company value was based on the stock price and now it’s based on revenues,” Allen says. “We used to talk about the New Economy. Now it’s the Real Economy. . . . You see over and over again that the financial results in the tech industry are based in reality. They’re not based on speculation about share prices or hopes that you can monetize visitors to your Web site.”
I go on to talk about how Enterprise 2.0 and analytics are hot areas for investment growth, how the U.S. IT labor force is larger than its ever been in history (including during the dot.com days), and how there’s real money behind these trends. It sounds like the happy days might be here again. Or maybe today’s days are even better, because they’re no longer based on fantasy (except for the multi-billion dollar online role-playing games industry, of course…).
Network World 4/25/08: “No slowdown for U.S. tech industry”. Also published on CIO.com.
Last night, our local ABC 7 news featured my startling insights into the recent iPhone pricing uproar. When Apple dropped the price of an iPhone from $599 to $399 after only two months, even Apple’s crazed fanbase rebelled. The early adopters got labelled as “losers” (or worse) for buying too soon.
Update: my clip went national today on Good Morning America and on the abcnews.com site. 
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 