Comment Articles

Are tech CEOs letting the industry down?

Charles Cooper, CNET.com CNET News.com

Published: 05 Feb 2003 14:24 GMT

When the World Economic Forum convened in 1997, the forum's organisers transformed the event into a veritable coming-out party for America's high-tech elite. So much of the talk at this annual gabfest for the world's political and economic leaders was about new business models, new technologies and new economies that the European, Asian and South American representatives could only watch and wonder at it all.

Six years later, however, the tech chief executive making the biggest stir at Davos, Switzerland, was Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation had donated $200m to aid poor nations. Otherwise the Silicon Valley zeitgeist was summed up by Cisco Systems chief executive John Chambers' declaration: "Tech for the sake of tech is over."

Chambers' pithy -- and decidedly downbeat -- assessment was of a piece with the times. As they departed the slopes of Switzerland, technology chief executives were fretting about yet another winter of discontent. But after two-and-a-half years of malaise, why can't the people running technology companies come up with more creative responses to the downturn?

Blaming Saddam only goes so far. He furnishes a convenient excuse for everything that's gone sour, but the technology industry slipped into recession long before Iraq ever turned into the story du jour. That's not to ignore facts on the ground. Truth be told, customers say they are more likely than not to postpone big IT purchases until a resolution to the latest geopolitical crisis.

Yet that still begs the question whether chief executive leadership in Silicon Valley, so lionised during the go-go days, is all that it's cracked up to be. Where's the imagination? Where's the outside-of-the-box thinking? Unfortunately, ordering yet another wave of mass layoffs doesn't qualify as evidence of managerial genius. Been there, done that.

At a certain point you have to ask the uncomfortable question whether these folks are really up to the enormity of the task ahead. These are tough times, but economic history did not end when the bubble burst. You wouldn't know that from the whining and moping that have dominated so many conference calls in the current earnings season.