Where's the Buzz? Does a lack of high-tech hype hurt our economy?

John Dvorak has an interesting column online this month. Starting with the current sad economic state, he discusses the role technologies companies may have had in causing our recent problems.

Summarizing the Death Throes of 2008 - Columns by PC Magazine:
"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?
. . .

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.

. . . while everyone claims that "you can get information online nowadays," the fact is that the online experience is totally different. The writing is different, and the kind of information that can be displayed effectively is different. Both can easily exist side by side. But magazines cannot survive when advertisers have decided en masse that online is a better place to advertise, completely abandoning print.

When you combine this with the push to take what was a unique American industry and pretty much hand it over to Asia, because it's cheaper to do things over there, then pretty soon everything is done there. While this in itself isn't a bad thing, Asians as a whole have no interest in print magazine advertising.

. . . once the advertising support for computer magazines dried up, the fortunes of AMD, Intel, Seagate, even Dell and Microsoft began to wane—as did their stock prices. The horrible reputation of Vista can be directly attributed to this phenomenon. Once magazines lost their realistic and calming influence, reputations were at the mercy of the online mob, much of which, egged on by Apple, hated Microsoft.

In many ways things are just as exciting as they ever were, but you'd never know it, would you? Information is scattered every which way."

Excitement over technologies still drives some of our purchases (Ex: touch screen cell-phones), but many folks are now accepting good-enough over seeking the newest or the best. Perhaps Dvorak is correct that this attitude has affected our economy. I think we can get through this current bad spot and emerge in an era where gadgets serve us, but we don't measure how cool others are by the gadgets they use. The time we spent reading about technology may be better used, but the lack of computer magazines certainly makes it difficult to feel in-touch with the high-tech industries - even if you work in them.