PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) -
It seems like only yesterday...
Well, no, scratch that. Let's be honest. It seems like it's been going on forever. It's been three years since the Nasdaq had its most sickening one-day slide, in retrospect the herald of much more gruesome times to come.
Forget the March 10 peak. On April 14, 2000, the index slid 355 points, or some 10 percent.
Looking back, even the horror then was kid's play for what was in store. So the Nasdaq was collapsing, so what? Consumer Internet stocks (remember all the nonsense about B2C, then B2B, and so on?) had tanked, but the optical-networking crash was still in front of us.
So was Enron. And the demise of Arthur Andersen. And the demise of the entire telecommunications industry. And Wall Street as we knew it. And of course, we had no glimmer of Sept. 11, let alone Operation Iraqi Freedom, aka Gulf War II.
No, back then to anyone whose stock market experience was just a few years old it looked like just another buying opportunity, a deep dip, but a dip all the same.
Fool me once...
We know better now. Or do we? Pip Coburn, the insightful tech-stock strategist for UBS Warburg, lists the famous "Five Stages of Grieving" in his recent weekly report to clients: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
He places the "tech ecosystem" between "anger" and "bargaining."
My first reaction to Coburn's assessment is that he's being too harsh. Surely we've progressed well beyond "bargaining" and are at least well into "depression." Aren't we?
And yet, for all the non-tech stocks traded in the Nasdaq 100 alone, good luck finding any among the most actively traded Nasdaq stocks on any given day. Those investors who still have money are still trying to get a piece of the tech action, still hoping they'll strike it rich.
Maybe Coburn's right and the "bargaining" is just beginning. There's a scary thought, because, of course, only after acceptance that there's no hope can we -- the tech-stock market -- move on.
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Intel outside?
I was just commenting the other day on how smart I thought Intel's Centrino strategy is: By spending a ton of dough -- which it has to spend -- Intel could help develop the Wi-Fi wireless protocol by encouraging folks to unwire themselves.
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It could be as successful as its famous "Intel Inside" program, which led to the company's dominance of the microprocessor market for PCs.
The tech-savvy person I made this comment to told me I was full of it. Wouldn't it be better to not spend boatloads of money on a market where you're not even close to being the dominant player?
The skeptical Coburn of UBS Warburg essentially agrees with my sparring partner. He calls Intel's "unwire" campaign "a fantasy of denial."
Perhaps it could get away with such hubris "when Moore's Law made markets and Intel invented ingredient marketing and decided what the next thing was that the planet would want." Now, Coburn concludes, "We expect that Intel will have trouble single-handedly forcing massive cultural change on to the market."
On second thought, ...
Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.
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