Five Things You Can Expect After the Tech Wreck

The question arises from time to time as to whether Silicon Valley will survive the latest tech wreck. Of course it will, though it will emerge with a slightly different look. Here are five suggestions of what to expect during the long, slow recovery.

The death of baseball metaphors. Venture capitalist John Doerr got headlines recently for apologizing for having called the Internet the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. He's now added a parenthetical "and evaporation" to his famous saying.

But the metaphor I always associate with Doerr is his oft-repeated belief that we were only in the second inning of the Internet. That always presumed that the Internet was a ballgame. Now we know the Internet isn't a game or a revolution. It's an enabling technology, sometimes a distribution mechanism.

What inning are we in? Who cares? Perhaps a literary metaphor is more apt. We're currently in the denouement of the Internet period, the final outcome of one helluva dramatic event. After the dead bodies are picked up off the stage, the actors who remain will have to roll up their sleeves and rebuild. Which leads to... ...