Frank Michael Russell

The Information Revolution a Decade After the Dot-Com Bust

Silicon Valley was a grim place in 2002, when economist W. Brian Arthur, law professor Lawrence Lessig, and former Intel Chairman Andy Grove gathered at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose for a Business 2.0 Live! discussion, “Is the Information Revolution Dead?”  As moderator Ned Desmond noted, the tech industry in the late 1990s had propelled a frenzied stock-market dot-com boom, which was followed by a just-as-dramatic dot-com bust early in the next decade.  The dot-com bust led to the demise of startups with questionable business models such as WebVan and Pets.com, but it also sharply reduced the market value of profitable, well-managed enterprises such as Cisco Systems.

From Diminishing to Increasing Returns in the Technology and News Industries

In a networked economy driven by technology and the value of knowledge workers, the idea of diminishing returns has been replaced by a new concept—increasing returns.  This change has ramifications for technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard—and for news organizations as they shift from “old” media such as print to “new” media such as websites and editions for mobile devices.