The New York Times has an article covering recent discussions that perhaps technology as an industry (an amazingly broad generalization of a very homogenous group) has become just another commoditized factor of production. Apparently, the Harvard Business Review published an article arguing just that:
"That assumption about technology's special role is questioned in a provocative article this month in The Harvard Business Review, titled 'IT Doesn't Matter.' The article asserts that information technology, or I.T. for short, is inevitably headed in the same direction as the railroads, the telegraph, electricity and the internal combustion engine — becoming, in economic terms, just ordinary factors of production, or 'commodity inputs.'"
Putting aside the absurd extension from the bsiness tools of IT to the whole of the technology business, I think this assessment ignores the major difference between tech and those products -- with some exceptions, technology is based on leveraging and multiplying intellectual property, rather than changing the physical world or overcoming its limitations (geography, etc.) in the way that previous technologies did. Once software is written, it can scale and be reused infinitely, without cost (assuming it remains useful.) That's a fairly fundamental violation of the basic tenet of economics that resources are limited, and it's a major reason why technology will continue to have an outsized impact on the way we live, and do business.
The reality, post-bubble, is that the people who are serious are still in the field, still trying to build new companies. They were there before the bubble and they'll be there for the rest of their lives. Last night I had drinks with a bunch of guys I worked with at my last tech startup, iKena. They're all still in the industry, several of them at KubiSoft, which has recently released a great add-on groupware client for Outlook that is being tested by a good number of large companies.
Meanwhile, the free-riders and quick-buck artists have moved on to new hunting grounds, leaving the industry better able to concentrate on the business of developing new tech.
[Via Techdirt]
