Comments on: When is the next tech boom?

By: Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 23:11:53 +0000

I also hope you’re right Doug and Randal. However I’ve seen enough of financial markets and human greed not to believe that the next upturn won’t overshoot. That may be – and I certainly believe will be – overlaid on an underlying trend of technology-based growth. If the overenthusiasm is more tempered than in the dot-com days, we can escape with less damage than last time. Though it won’t be too long before that too was another blip in a long-term trend.

By: Randal Leeb-du Toit

Randal Leeb-du Toit — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 21:19:37 +0000

Ross – things are definitely swinging up, early stage venture funds are being raised again and there is an upbeat atmosphere settling in — like Doug though, I am more inclined to see this as a sustained upward trend rather than a spike/trough effect a la dot boom/crash.

By: Doug McDavid

Doug McDavid — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:34:44 +0000

I hope you’re wrong about this one, Ross. I’m more positively disposed to the view of Carlota Perez, an economist in the Kondratiev and Schumpeter vein, who talks about five major cycles of technological revolution and wealth creation over the last 250 years. She sees a pattern to these major cycles (such as Industrial Revolution, Age of Steam and Railways, etc.) where there is an emerging period for a revolutionary technological complex, characterized by irrational exuberance and disconnection between finance and technology, followed by a crash, and then by a long sustained period of more deliberate wealth creation that she calls “deployment”. If she is right and this is pattern is predictive, then we are just coming out of the crash of the boom phase of the age of information and telecommunications, and headed for 20-30 years of powerful, sustained worldwide growth. Sounds good to me!