Is a tech credibility gap adding to corporate financial woes?

[quasar]

I just read an interesting article in DigitalMass that mentions a tech credibility gap as one of the causes of the tech company bombouts that have positively plagued Boston.

But John McCarthy, research director at Forrester Research in Cambridge, thinks there might be another force in play — a tech credibility gap.

Corporate technology buyers, after being sold a succession of overhyped Net-based technologies in the late 1990s, simply don't believe the claims being made by tech vendors. They're wary of committing to another technology that proves overly complex, difficult to deploy, or simply doesn't deliver enough business value.

What do you think?

Janice

[brian_igo]

The net was overhyped? By people who were peddling services and products for the web?

Getouttahere!

I think this is a painful but necessisary maturiation process for the tech industry. In one way it is proof that technology has arrived. Even a mid market company now understands how important its IT is to daily operations, and they aren't willing to endanger that unless a vendor can prove a new system is better and it works reliably from day one.

On the other hand, and in the smartass vein I opened with, a lot of companies got screwed hard by stupid sales reps and CIO's who bought into the internet retailing scam. Five years ago you couldn't find a sane voice in technology. The geeks, sales hacks and pundits (all only representing only the tech side of the story) honestly believed e-tailing would make brick and mortar selling obsolete. If you were one of the people on that bandwagon in '97 and '98, or you work for a company that was, you should probably expect to have your crediblity and intelligence questioned today.

The tech industry is going to have a rough go of it for the next decade because the golden era of invention is largely gone. As I mentioned in another post, there is nothing on the horizion that will have the same effect on business that barcoding and spreadsheet programs had over the last twenty years. The sector is going to have to concentrate more on refinement than visionary advances, and they are going to have to make a profit at it.

Also, tech needs to shake itself of the delusion that it drives the economy. What happens to Wal Mart or any of the automakers is much, much more important to the greater economy than anything at Microsoft, Sun or Cisco.


Brian