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Has The "Technology Bounceback" Begun?
jg21 writes "Has the 'return of technology' begun, asks this article in the wake of all the coverage of CES both here on Slashdot and elsewhere. But just as it's difficult to gauge how many swallows make a summer, how do you measure a technology bounceback? JDJ's suggestions include indicators from 2004 such as the doubling of Google's share price in just 6 months, the mega-sucess of the iPod, and the success of the Blackberry." Decent article that asks a good question; you'll have to wade through the ads to get to the real text.
...for me, it's like a Crackberry
-Reggie Fils-Aime, vp marketing, Nintendo of America, Inc.
Anyone who believes so probably thought the dot com boom would last forever........
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
that the "bounceback" is begining. I know many individuals who have no intrest in buying new tech products. They are quite happy with the last generation and see no reason to upgrade yet. Just because there is a new product does not mean that people will buy it.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
Quick, let's set up a company where people can order dog-food online. We'll ask Fed-ex to take care of the shipping! IPO here I come!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Is it really "technology bounceback" or a new term for "dotcom bubble reinflation" ??
Not that it would be a bad thing.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Nah... Not yet. We're just now getting some stuff that the Korean and Japaneese school kiddies have had for the past 5 years.
:)
Wait 1-3 more years for us to get them fully integrated into our lives.
I know some people are already there. But I think for the most part, even those of us with these gadgets, using them constantly to their capabilities is not yet within comonplace.
I mean, I actidenditly forgot my pda somewhere and lasted like 3 days without it. And that was just after a new year res to use the thing more.
I haven't synched it in like a monthe either.
-=fshalor
When the tech industry is starting to offer better products for more reasonable prices, I call that a bounceback.
By that standard, it's hard to say. The video card industry is looking really good right now, but so far there hasn't been all that much competition to IPod, so that just seems like an entrenchment of a single popular product (and experience suggests this leads to stagnation more than innovation). Plus, Google's stock doubling doesn't really seem to have all that much impact upon technology so much as the world of business. We get the benefits of their technology in their services, sure, but it's not like google is all of a sudden THAT much better than it's been for the past few years.
Frankly, when it comes to technology, I'd say that software is having the resurgence, not hardware. Open Source solutions are as strong and available as ever, meaning that Microsoft has had to pick up the pace in terms of the innovations it provides (or claims to, anyhow). And how spoiled are we that we can look at a game like Doom3 and be bored?
If there is such a bouncback where are the jobs.
.NET.
.NET hadn't even existed for 5 Years).
;)
People want to pay a graduate wage to get a person with a good amount of experiance.
Some jobs demand a MCSE for things that are not even related to the qualification.
Others are just plain absurd. eg about 1.5 years ago I saw an add asking for CCNA, MCSE and 5+ years commercial experiance with
(The salary was £17-22k per year and
If there is a revolution howabout some jobs.. go on please
Rather than "must have gadgets", how about gaugeing a technology recovery by numbers of unemployed/underemployed technology workers?
TFA just says 'Is the dot-com boom back? We've published several technology stories this week, here are links to them'.
I might get into journalism, has to be easier than working for a living.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
The IT "bounceback" will be a real bounceback when hiring takes place in earnest...on our own shores.
And equating Google's share price with an IT "bounceback" leads me to believe that the bursting of the bubble taught some people nothing.
Yeah. I've been living in Asia for a few years, and everybody talks about how bad the economy is here. Most people seem to believe that the economy is in the tank seriously.
In reality, The economy grows steadily at 2-3%. This is reasonable and sustainable, but many want a return to the heyday of double digit growth. It won't happen and they'd better come to accept that.
Many (non-IT) folks I talk to also look back to that time when stock prices were through the roof, everyone's 401K was looking good, and politicians were talking about how to spend all the extra money. They, too, just need to get over it.
I hope that IT comes bak in a small way, but nothing like the 90s should ever happen again...
Dan
Put identity in the browser.
If people have money, they buy toys. Technology these days are mostly about toys. So, if the economy booms, people spend more, and companies sell more. What they sell goes in cycles. Currently, people have already bought a lot of computers, so this niche will rest for another year or two before there will be new, strong demand (caveat below). Cell phones are being switched more often, due to their lesser price and bundling with subscriptions, and also because there are more features coming out with new phones, 3G and camera phones being the latest. This is already a full-paced market.
Video cameras and digital cameras also enjoy a more constant demand, and the same goes for mp4 players. iPod will continue to sell well, and there are currently no competitors worth mentioning. As a side effect, there might be an increased demand for Apple branded computers, especially if they sell a basic cheapo-Mac with a small or no margin of profit. This _will_ cut into the Wintel monopoly, because of the iPod.
However, there are no other spin-offs due to the iPod. When the Web was unleashed, there was an ever increasing demand for content, and a whole array of side technologies arose. This market is now satisified, and can only grow at a moderate rate.
So, people will buy an iPod. They will love it. They will love the Mac with Mac OS X and the simplicity, usefulness and ease of use it has, saying bye-bye to Kansas (viruses, spy-ware, malfunction). They will discover iMovie and iPhoto, and they might consider buying digital cameras or video recorders. They will embrace the digital life-style offered by Apple, shunning the Microsoft version in progress. Vengeance is in progress.
This is bad news for Apple bashers, but good news for the rest of us.
According to my Cisco teacher the tech industry experiences and up and down pattern about every ten years. First there was PC, and then the Dot Com bubble each followed by a period of less investment but public confidence in the technology. I predict there will be another boom in high tech possibly in Free/Open software. Which will (like the PC and Web boom before them) create a public confidence in Open Source even if investment drops. So you will lose the battle but win the war.
I find the 'printer friendly' version to be far more readable. :)
Given that, I wonder where Europe is in all of this?
...But just as it's difficult to gauge how many swallows make a summer...
:)
Well, it depends, are we talking about African or European swallows?
Its funny how everyone talks of the dot-com crash as if the entire industry was almost wiped-out. It was just a correction, an economic cycle. I mean, I'm showing my age here, but I remember a time when I had to get online with a 300-baud modem, and only about 10 people besides myself had a computer at my entire high-school. And we all new each other. Technology never went away. Its so far ingrained into everyone's life now. The Dotcoms may have gone bust, but I can buy a 50 dollar DVD player now thats better than the 300 dollar one I got in 2000. The internet and telecom is not technology, just a subset of it. I wish people would remember that fact, and not base the entire tech sector on just a few areas.
My contract ended Dec 31 and I have been looking for a job ever since. I can say it looks better than it did last year this time.
Technology never went away, even if there was a reduction in investment and a slowdown in markets. The reason is very simple: civilization is now so deep into technological dependency that it is quite impossible for the first world to function without its modern accoutrements. That makes any apparent breaks or slowdowns in the march of technology merely temporary and largely illusory anyway --- engineers and scientists continue doing their thing regardless of investor indifference. In adverse economic conditions, their efforts come to life in products later rather than sooner, that's all.
Technological progress has something equivalent to inertia, in that it resists any attempt to stop or even slow it down. In part this is because insight and innovation occurs more in the head than in the lab, and budget cutbacks never stopped anyone thinking. On top of that, science and technology is subject to positive feedback and exponential growth not just in scale but in number of dimensions as well, so it's no surprise that technology sees almost no slowdown regardless of the lack of helpful but non-critical investment.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm an early adopter and I don't see anything I'm going to buy. My next computer purchase might be one of the $500 apples if they can get me one before I read a sucky review (like review of a cheap video chip in the new imacs). I don't need any more disk space. I'll buy a gig sd card when they are below $70 and not before since I've never used most of my current sd memory or my usb memory stick but having a gig of tiny memory would be cool for some stilly reason.
.55tb I can't use right now (thanks sun!). Maybe I'm getting to old for the toys but I haven't seen anything real impressive in a while.
I don't need another mp3 player. In fact I've given away at least two and the ones around the house never get used. (but I'm going to hack one for underwater use if I can get the oregon sci replacement headsets).
So Mr toy makers... impress me or you won't see my money. Get me a postscript color laser printer for $200 or get me a 7 inch LCD touch screen that will work in a midwest summer in a car. I don't need fancy software unless its real cool and I'm not into security snake oil. I would by security dongles if you provided open source source code to talk to the thing but I'm installing your binaries on my box. I don't need bigger hard drives since I've got nearly
I'm not so sure that the "bounceback" is begining.
I'm not sure the question is even meaningful. Like all first-world countries, the US will continue to consume new technology at the maximum rate its consumers and corporations can afford, because it is no longer possible to even contemplate living without it.
The bigger question is whether the US will be creating much of it, rather than merely consuming what the rest of the world delivers. I think that there's every likelihood that it won't be creating anywhere near as much new technology as it used to, simply because in the last few years it has created for itself an utterly stiffling regulatory environment that benefits only lawyers and megacorps, and so breaks the widespread positive feedback that fuels innovation.
It doesn't look good to me, not for the US nor for the rapidly self-immolating Europe. This century seems to be tipping in favor of the far east.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm at the #1 company that provides precision A/C units for mainframes. In the mid 90's we made about 150 deluxe units a week. Sales climbed with the bubble over a period of years. We were making 550 units per week by the time the bubble burst. Sales dropped to a tenth of that when the bubble burst. The 'new' people on the shop floor have now been there for 7 years. We are now staffed for 150 again and waiting for the bounceback.
GOOG is fueled by hype, and a GMail system that is STILL in beta. Institutional investors would rarely put GOOG as part of their list of stocks, even though GOOG's initial share price is indeed targetting thouse. The iPod is not exactly the same because it's more of a portable music device such as a walkman or discman. The Blackberry is more an ugly cell phone but with hormone-enhanced SMS. Returning of technology? THAT should be judged by technology spending at the corporate level, not a couple consumer gadgets plus a overhyped stock.
I don't know about the past, but with exciting new technology like the Rune Radionics leading the way I'm QUITE sure the bounceback will be here soon.
It's hard to see a single company's stock price validate a recovery of an entire economic sector; Google's a unique company and many people may see such a "brain trust" as valuable simply because there may be much that comes out of it.
As for iPods and Blackberry? iPods are consumer electronics and have little business relevance -- big-screen TVs have been doing well for over a year now (LCD RP, DLP, and more recently ED plasma) and no one thinks of that as an economic recovery checklist entry, just the portion of the economy that has done well buying toys (and perhaps those that haven't done well commiting credit suicide).
Blackberry isn't a terribly expensive complex technology to roll out until you get to multi-server enterprise levels and can be done with home ISPs. It's also a major upper management status toy, and since when has the technology downturn denied that particular economic segment anything?
I'll believe a technology turnaround when *hiring* becomes more common, *salaries* start to get a boost, and business start investing in large, long-term IT projects. Up 'till now it's been small projects and keep-your-head-above-water stuff to prevent total obsolecense, not big-spending projects.
I said, "A water shed? Like an outhouse?"
He said, "No. A Watershed is a geographic term. It's a high point. Something which defines the terrain and the river systems. The flow of water."
Ah. . . The flow of life energy. Gotcha. Powerful term. Didn't say that, though. He continued. .
"The Steam Engine was a watershed mark. So was the Printing Press. Telephones. You understand? The world is waiting for the next big one, and nobody knows what it will be."
"Any ideas," I asked.
He shook his head. "I don't know. I think it might have something to do with digital switching." (My pop worked at Nortel) "We've made some spectacular advances in the last few years. It's possible to do things now with the switches we make that you simply couldn't have imagined only a few years ago. None of that potential has been tapped yet. But I don't know. Telephones are old news."
We had this conversation before there was an internet. --We had modems and BBS's, but the internet hadn't breached the shell of public awareness. GUI web browsers and email were the big steps I think. They were the watershed. There would have been no tech bubble without email and GUI web browsers. Netscape and Eudora and similar were the tips of the iceberg. Tips of the rising watershed.
The bubble itself was then all about hype and over-excitement. --Justifiable over-excitement, (if that makes any sense). After all, the web did change the world, and it did make some people very, very wealthy. Amazon.com is finally the giant everybody suspected it would become. It didn't happen over-night, and people were anxious and stupid about it, but it certainly happened.
Watersheds only come about once in a long while, and not often in the same medium. Star Wars introduced high-tech production values never before seen. It re-defined the way movies were made. Spielberg understood this and tried to push the same kind of hype around Jurasic Park, using extensive CG animation and touting that as the next big step. His so-so film just happened to ride the coat tails, and he knew it. --Annoyingly enough, his plan sort of worked. CG animation certainly wasn't his invention, but he did bring it to the spotlight.
But in computer IT? What's the next big thing? What's going to make everybody go hoola-hoop rubic's-cabbage-patch again?
Well, first you need unformed power, like the advanced digital switches my father worked on at Nortel, which have massive potential but no application. Then you need somebody to come along and define that power.
So what's out there in tech land? Heck if I know. I'm not a technologist. This wireless bullshit is interesting, (and rather threatening, I think), but just a small step. People already understand that technology. It's not new. It's not unimaginable, like the simple graphic web page would have been twenty years ago. We've had walkie-talkies for ages now.
So what will it be?
-FL
"The internet and telecom is not technology, just a subset of it. I wish people would remember that fact, and not base the entire tech sector on just a few areas."
Actually, you're wrong. We don't build any of the electronic gadgetry you see sitting on the shelves of Best Buy. We don't even design most of it anymore. This is all done in various parts of Asia. Software and telecom are all that's left in the USA. Therefore, software and telecom are what defined the tech bubble for us. If you want to say that "internet and telecom" are just a subset of our tech sector, feel free. However, that "subset" is the primary things that made our bubble.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
It depends on what you mean by loyalty. I don't think that the loyalty these people are talking about is what you took them to mean.
When I think of employee loyalty, I don't think of the guy who puts in his 40-45 hours of good work and then goes home. This should be expected of each and every worker at every company. When I think of loyalty, I think of the guy who works 60 hours of good work, or more if necessary, because he cares about doing a good job, and he cares that the company is succeeding because of his work. That's more than a resource. That's a reliable worker who you can count on not to keep pushing when things get tough rather than jump ship at the first sign of rough water.
And for loyalty like that, an employee should be able to expect a little bit of a kickback. A loyal company would let him take a day off after two weeks of 60+ work hours. A loyal company would give higher wages, or at least bonuses to employees who have to be on call. I don't think such things are too much to ask.
Wow, you really scream liberal (in the worst sense of the word).
I agree with the grandparent, but I don't tend to think of myself as a liberal. But if holding the opinion that it's generally bad to take advantage of people at every opportunity, and not wanting to work at a company that does that, makes me a liberal, then so be it.
I guess the F-117 Raptor was built by a telecom company? And the M-1 tank was built in the Philippines? And Intel didn't design any of its CPU's using American Engineers? Apple designed the Mac's in Thailand?
a ccelerator_list.html
Maybe most of it isn't "Assembled" here. But there are still a lot of things designed in the US.
A lot of pure research is still done in the US and Europe: http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/Informationen/
Didn't /. just post an article like a month ago about how the IT sector unemployment rate is actually higher than the national average? Aren't we in the middle of the biggest outsourcing orgy in history? Isn't there disaster brewing on both sides of the pond with the software patent quibbles?
Saying that Google's shareprice is the bellwether for the health of an entire economic sector is like a doctor saying you don't have cancer cuz your head's not warm.
There is no loyalty from the company to you.
And if you're smart, you won't be giving any loyalty to the company in turn. Remember that although YOU are a resource and nothing more where the company is concerned, the COMPANY is nothing more than a resource to YOU. They don't, and never will, deserve anything like loyalty.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?