Has Technology Lost Its Special Status?

from the oh-calm-down dept

In the last month or so there has been an increasing number of vaguely positive articles about the tech industry, wondering if it's starting to come back. Not surprisingly, there's been a quick backlash to these articles. Just like in the boom years, when the true believers felt that it would go on forever and tried to shout down anyone who suggested otherwise, now the pessimists have taken over and seem to believe that the downturn is going to last forever as well. The NY Times is running an article wondering if the tech world has lost its "special" status and will now just be seen as a plain old "factor of production" from now on. In some ways, the article is similar to the recent one we posted from Po Bronson saying that Silicon Valley was becoming Detroit. The pessimists (like the super optimists of the boom years) are missing the point. They're looking at things in aggregate, and don't seem to realize that "technology" is too broad a category to simply look at as a "factor of production". Technology, and the companies that produce it, still have the power to transform businesses, industries and the entire economy, but it depends on what they're used for and how it's implemented. There will be another technology boom, and the optimists will come out of the woodwork again. I'm just wondering if they'll be the same pessimists we're seeing today. You would think, at some point, people would realize that "the present" is never pemanent.