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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robert b furman who wrote (5204)	1/29/2003 2:22:49 PM
From: Robert Douglas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

Re:I always remember being surprised that the recovery seems to spring out of doom and gloom.Perhaps the return of the PC replacement cycle will accelerate that? No reason to be surprised, that's the natural course of things. Comments from this week’s Economist article on the internet society: Billions of dollars have been lost betting on the idea that the internet would quickly change everything from retailing to entertainment. Internet usage has continued to grow, but most dotcoms have failed, and the telecommunications industry, which raced to build the infrastructure for cyberspace, is staggering under $1 trillion of debt. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that this is the end of the internet revolution. Boom and bust often follow the introduction of radically new technologies. In the 1870s America's railroad industry boomed in much the same way as the world's telecoms industry in the late 1990s, only to collapse in a similar heap of bankruptcies, accounting scandals, stockmarket losses and enormous debts. America's economy fell into recession. A few years later, a reviving economy together with advances in railway engineering triggered a new wave of investment. Railroads quickly revived, changing American business forever. The same sort of thing happened when the internal combustion engine came along. In the first few years of the 20th century there were thousands of people tinkering with carmaking, most of whom went bust. A decade later only a handful survived, but the car was about to become the icon of progress.