Two tech swallows may mark summer recovery

Net Results: Are we in recovery yet? We've all been asking that question about the technology industry for three years now, and most of the time the answer has been that it will arrive in six months.

Always, six months. Don't ask me why, unless the industry is pegging its recovery on the half-life of any Microsoft operating system. What's a half-life, you say? It's the period of time in which Windows will operate with some effectiveness before it begins to decompose into something that makes you throw a shoe across the room on a regular basis after turning on your PC.

For most people this seems to be about six months. Then you do a reinstall (cue scary organ chord) and you're back to working (semi-) happily for another six months.

As an equal opportunity operating system employer, I should disclose that my Mac, after about six months, is also reaching this point, with programs freezing for no apparent reason. I keep reading about people who gush that they never, ever have to reboot their Macs as they always run perfectly, but I wonder who these people are and whether they do anything with their machines besides turn them on. Because once I get a certain number of programs running at the same time, one of them eventually freezes up. Adding new programs also always endangers the fragile balance in the ecosystem of any OS.

I don't use my Red Hat Linux OS often enough to observe whether the same phenomenon holds true. I should test this out, I know, and I should use Linux more, to get a better feel for it.

But as soon as I found I'd have to go out on the internet and find bits and pieces of little programs that Linux enthusiasts have written in order to make something like the modem work with the OS, I put such tasks on the "when I have time" schedule.

I know that many Linux people have lots of time for such things, and love the process. But I'm afraid I find it hard to make such additional labours a priority. Because I can't use the internet when I am using Linux I tend to use Linux very, very rarely. I do intend to get this sorted out but I need to find the time. Someday.

And yes, since you ask, I do feel sometimes like my three unruly operating systems are the occasionally charming but frequently misbehaving virtual children in my life. No sooner do you get one to act decently than one of the others comes up with some fresh hell for your admittedly weak PC/Mac troubleshooting skills.

But all of this was just supposed to be a little metaphor for a consideration of whether we are approaching some kind of recovery in the tech sector at long last, or whether we have another OS half-life or two to wait out the downturn.

I am happy to report that I'm pretty sure we are emerging from the downturn. Why? Day trading and Red Herring, that's why.

This week, the Wall Street Journal was happily weeping over the return of day trading. Remember day trading? Scruffy guys in pyjamas causing the fortunes of newly public companies to fluctuate as they debated over their morning coffee whether to buy or sell swathes of IPO shares over their home PCs? Of course you do.

Yes, day trading is back, and according to the Wall Street Journal, "online brokerage firms are slashing commissions to woo quick-fingered stock investors." They profile an 82-year-old retired contractor from San Diego, California who buys and sells as soon as he can make even a 50 cent per share profit from his investments. Go, grandpa!

Nothing says "technology delirium" to me so clearly as day trading, which helped fuel the bubble before it burst. Well, nothing except perhaps Red Herring, the king of the tech business industry magazines.

The Herring is back. After folding last April in print form, it relaunched on the web last Thursday at www.redherring. com. The publication has returned with new investors, backed, interestingly, by European money.

Its new editor is the former founder and editor of Business 2.0, another of the Herring copy-cat publications of the boom, which eventually merged with Time Warner's eCompany Now. The CEO and publisher is Parisian entrepreneur Alex Serge Vieux, who runs the ETRE conference and DASAR, an organisation that helps technology start-ups.

The Herring's survival depends precisely on whether we have a decent recovery under way, in which case the publication can - it hopes - ride a new wave of interest and confidence in the sector. Curiously, it's opting for an Economist-style format of unbylined articles, lots of graphs, and a crisp, concise writing style.

I think the time is probably propitious for Red Herring's return. As a disclaimer I should note that I am doing some writing for them (I also wrote a piece or two for the print magazine back in its boom days, when it got so large my postman refused to deliver it and made me go collect it, labelled as a "small packet", from the local sorting office).

Two other tech business magazines, Upside and Industry Standard, are gone now, leaving the merged Business 2.0/eCompany as the only big horse in the stable. But Business 2.0 has always lacked the name recognition and industry weight of Red Herring, and at the moment doesn't seem to quite know what it wants to be.

That leaves an opening for the Herring, which, incidentally, sold its subscriber list to Business 2.0 when it folded, and under the terms of that agreement, can't reappear in print form until September of next year. If it can build its online presence and survive I'd expect to see if back in print. And by that point, two half-lives away, we'll know whether the recovery is, at last, under way.

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