I've seen similar analogies to the airline industry, but IMHO this misses the forest for the trees. Tech isn't an industry, like automobiles or airlines. Tech

I've seen similar analogies to the airline industry, but IMHO this misses the forest for the trees. Tech isn't an industry, like automobiles or airlines. Tech is industry, like machine tools and assembly lines. When industry was first developed in the 1810s it meant specifically the textile industry, which was the easiest existing manufacturing task that could benefit from power tools and specialized workers on an assembly line. It was only a century later that we could begin to dream of things like automobiles and airplanes. Similarly, I bet that our great-grandchildren will look upon the Internet, e-commerce, and mobile phones the same way we look upon railroads, paddle steamers, and power looms. Great inventions for their time, and drivers of huge fortunes, but also quaint anachronisms that have long since been replaced by better alternatives. Notice that the article focuses almost entirely on I/O and the physical location of computation. This is a pretty good sign that we're still in the infrastructure phase of the information revolution. When we get to the deployment phase, the focus will be on applications, and our definition of an industry focuses on what you can do with the technology (like fly or drive) rather than how the technology works. In between there's usually an epochal war that remakes the structure of society itself using the new technologies. FWIW, there was a similar "quiet period" between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, from 1840-1870s. It was very similar: the primary markets of the original industrial revolution (textiles, railroads, steamboats) matured, and new markets like telegraphs were not big enough to sustain significant economic growth. But economic growth picked up dramatically once a.) the tools of the industrial revolution could be applied to speed up science itself and b.) the social consequences of the industrial revolution remade individual states into much larger nation-states, which created larger markets. That's when we got steel, petroleum, electrification, automobiles, airplanes, radio, and so on.