Summarizing the Death Throes of 2008 Part. 1

by John C. Dvorak

You can be certain that everyone will blame the economy for the horrible end-of-year retail sales of tech products. But perhaps they should blame tech itself for doing so little to excite the public. Even Steve Jobs is bailing out of the Macworld keynote; as far as I can tell, he's got nothing exciting to show.


Tech is the tail that wags the economic dog, in case you haven't noticed. When something big is going on in tech—such as dotcom mania in the late 1990s—then everything heats up. Right now there's virtually nothing going on in tech except minutiae. Let's examine the problem.



First of all, the newest technologies have not been well promoted. Promotion has always been the key to tech. For example, name the top ten new technologies that were developed last year. Better yet, just name five. Nothing?

Why can't you name them? It's probably because they weren't reported except in EE Times and a few scattered Web sites. Whose fault is that? Well, in the olden days, you could probably blame the media for not doing its job, but those days are over. The media has been decimated, and informational sources are now so incredibly scattered that it's impossible for the media to do its job without help from industry.

And industry has dropped the ball. It's not helping anyone.

The media is trying to keep up. The PCMag.com home page is cluttered with information and reviews. But out of the smoke screen of information you still cannot tell me the five most interesting technologies that developed or emerged last year.

What's missing is the buzz that used to be generated, mainly utilizing a complex mechanism that no longer exists due to neglect—the computer magazine.

Source : http://www.pcmag.com