Who hasn't heard grumbling from executives, developers and just about everyone in high tech about how they aren't getting rich the way they thought they would? The further we get from a 5,000-point NASDAQ, the louder the noise gets.
It seems that Alan Greenspan wasn't too far off when he used the term "irrational exuberance" to describe the stock market. It's just that the rest of the world took a couple of years to come to the same conclusion.
I doubt that many IT managers have been wowed as much by a vendor's stock prices as by the quality of its latest products. Nevertheless, IT managers are, to some degree, investing in the companies from which they buy products. eWEEK readers know that when they buy an online trading platform or choose a Web server or an ISP, they are betting their e-business on that company's products, IT employees and its performance in almost every way.
But the kind of irrational exuberance that IT buyers like to see is the kind that drives young developers to dream up new and unheard-of technologies and then spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering with and perfecting them--the kind that led to the creation of the Web and wireless technologies, the kind that Steve Jobs tapped into when he charged his troops with a call to create "insanely great" products.
We need our industry to return to that kind of almost naive fascination with technology. In the Internet boom of the past decade, young companies have increasingly rushed to the IPO just because they could. What would happen if some of that energy were channeled back into creating insanely great software just because you could?
The boom that heralded the beginning of the Internet economy may be fading, but there is still lots of money to be made by developing, implementing and administering technology. Now that the rush is subsiding, hope the fun will return, and making money will be only one factor among many driving technology.
