Infoworld Article: Bush official delivers wake-up call to IT industry

[Adam L. Beberg]

On Thu, 2 May 2002, Owen Byrne wrote:

> All I could think reading this article was "Mature Industry - VCs will
> be looking elsewhere from now on."

*chuckles* yes, the entire computer industry is extremely mature in that
sense. Almost all of it is now a commodity, bandwidth for Joe Average being
the only thing that wasnt a commodity 20 years ago.

The problem is there is very little else to look at for investors - which
demand exponential growth. What else has non-commodity growth anymore? There
is biotech, but the amount of money you can effectively throw at Chemistry
PhD's is very limited, and the diseases that have enough victoms and dont
already have a daily pill are very limited as well. Sure you can make
billions on a drug, but it takes billions to develop a drug in the first
place, so the rate of return sucks. You do far better playing the stock
swings between press releases and patent expirations.

Wireless has alot of geeks excided with mesh networks and the like, but when
10 companies _already_ have a $60 home unit when the press hasn't even
started hyping it up yet doesn't inspire a non-commodity scenario, but does
scare the bandwidth providers.

"Web services" are all the rage, but I think we all know that what IIS can
do, Apache can do better, and what .com can create .gnu can copy. Not long
after .NET was announced, the the free copy of .NET projects were started
guarenteing another commodity scenario. If we're "lucky" and develops into
a market at all, which I'm hoping it wont due to the security/privacy
nightmare.

- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
  http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/
  beberg@mithral.com