Machine memories

The technology industry is like a goldfish. It somehow manages to advance itself through the water from year to year, but it seems to lack any memory. How else do you explain phrases such as traditional Web application, or marketing people who talk about virtualization as though it were something VMware invented last Tuesday at a wild coding party?Everything in information technology is derivative. And so, it seems, are the reasons why technology companies fail. A quick survey of advertisements from Federal Computer Week’s first two years of publication is like a walk through a graveyard of bad business decisions, technology dead ends and corporate hubris.But technology companies never really die. They just get acquired and become someone else’s legacy problem.