IT goes golden or grey?

Wed, 14 May 2003 07:26:00 -0400
/technology

Interesting Economist article about IT leaving it’s exponential roots behind and ‘just working’. I read somewhere that this is actually regurgitated Oracle PR but I’m a sucker for slick historic parallels, so:

When Britain’s railway mania collapsed in 1847, railroad shares plunged by 85%, and hundreds of businesses went belly-up. But train traffic in Britain levelled off only briefly, and in the following two decades grew by 400%.

Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, puts it somewhat more succinctly: “I am optimistic about technology, but not about profits.”