The Naught Decade

About a year ago, as the world was hurtling into depression, I remarked that that our semiconductor industry was entering a rabbit hole and like Alice in the Through the Looking Glass we might find it hard to imagine what’s on the other side. As we enter this new decade I believe we are emerging from the rabbit hole, and indeed we find our new reality “curiouser and curiouser!”

 

It’s been an astonishingly bad decade. As we entered it in late 1999 the entire world was drunk with dot-com irrationalism and fretting about Y2K. Those days now seem surreal as our memories are scarred by the dot-com crash, 9-11, the Enron scandal, US dollar collapse, war in Iraq, housing collapse, banking collapse, and stock market collapse. And that’s just in America! In the middle of all this are the two largest recessions in the history of the 50-year old semiconductor that bracket the beginning and end of the decade. A rough ride to say the least.

The rest of this post can be seen as part of my regular column on Electronics Weekly, at the following link:  http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2010/01/12/47767/warren-savage-on-the-naught-decade.htm