(FORTUNE Magazine) – You have to admire the indomitable spirit of the technology industry. Businesses are running IT budgets through a wood chipper, and the industry still won't give up on its "next big things." Silly rabbits. Here are five tech trends the hype machine is pumping full blast that will always be nonstarters.

BLUETOOTH. Products using the short-distance wireless standard have been delayed more times than a Warren Beatty comedy. Supposedly they're coming, but what does Bluetooth let you do that you can't already? Your Bluetooth cell phone will be able to talk to your Bluetooth handheld. What will they say to each other? Beats me. You can send a file to the printer without having a cable attached. That's assuming that you buy a Bluetooth card for your PC and a Bluetooth-enabled printer, which I guess is the idea. Wow! Hundreds of dollars in new tech to replace a $10 cable. Genius.

NEW DOMAIN EXTENSIONS. Apparently all the "good" domain names are gone, so now you can buy a site that ends with .info, .biz, or .pro rather than .com. Doesn't this reinforce .com as the Net's Boardwalk and Park Place? Do you really want to be stuck on Baltic Avenue? Worse still are the "rogue" extensions available from places like New.net and name-space.com, offering names ending in .travel and .inc. Cute, but visitors need their ISP and their browser configured to recognize those sites. It's like putting your shop on that dark aisle of the mall next to the organ store. No one is ever going to find you! If the .com you want isn't free, go fish.

INSTANT MESSAGING. Do you think AOL and Microsoft in their battle over instant messaging are fighting over a bunch of chatty 12-year-old girls? No, these guys think that IM will replace the telephone, and they're going to get a piece of every call you make through their networks. The whole point of using IM is to not have a phone conversation, so I don't quite get the logic here. And have you ever used IM? It's the time waster to beat all time wasters. You might as well give all your employees a PlayStation2 to replicate its productivity effects. Hold on to your handsets, Batman.

WIRELESS PLATFORMS. Vatican City is a bigger market than commerce through cell phones and handhelds. Did International Data Corp. really predict that this would be a $419 million market in 2001? Businesses being able to send sales pitches to customers' wireless devices using location detection sounds great, if you ignore that it's high-tech panhandling. Too bad. If anything could have forced people to turn off cellphones in public places, this was it.

PERSONALIZATION. Studies claim that personalized e-commerce sites get people to spend more. How can that be? Ooh, you can pull off a cheap parlor trick like putting "Hello, David!" on the home page. You like me! You really like me! And those computer-driven recommendations. Amazon.com, the most sophisticated of the bunch, thinks I'd like a book about moonshining. Why? I bought a sports book once. I don't get it either; it's not as if Stills for Dummies was a recent buy. Invest your money in customer service instead. Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE? E-mail david_lidsky@timeinc.com.