Eppicenter:
Stock market readjustment promises a strong future.
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 During the last few years when the stock market was going through its period of “irrational exuberance,” it seemed that the primary aim of many would-be entrepreneurs was not to bring a product to market but rather to be bought by a larger company or to participate in an IPO. This was particularly true in our field of information technology. It seemed that no matter how flimsy the business model, people were eager to invest in a dot.com not because they may have believed in the business, but because they thought other people would invest–people who also probably thought other people would invest, and continue the cycle. In the old days this would probably have been called a pyramid scheme and would have been illegal. A very prominent speaker in our Distinguished Lecturer Series last year went so far as to say that profit was an obsolete concept in the New Economy. Well, I did not believe that any more than I believe that someone can get around the law of conservation of energy and build a perpetual motion machine.
Now that the market for dot.coms has crashed, the new, more realistic attitude is something that I welcome. It is fun to solve problems where there are rules–business rules. In order to make a business viable, you have to have a product or service that adds value. If anyone can play, no matter how badly they play, it’s not fun. It’s like playing Scrabble with people who feel they can make up their own spellings of words.
Part of the enjoyment of working in the computer field is using one’s mind, and using technical knowledge together with a practical understanding of people and systems to solve real problems. That’s what CTI brings to the table and offers students, and that is what our students offer the larger society.
In an overreaction to current trends, there are gloomy predictions about the future. Now I do not know what the economy will do in the short term, but I do know that the future for our profession is very bright. Computers are not going away, and the tremendous build-up of networking infrastructure, telecommunications and computing capacity will enable us to work on many interesting, challenging and exciting problems in the future.
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