If you work in Silicon Valley long enough, you can’t help noticing how much the technology industry resembles the women’s clothing business. Both are fashion-driven. Fashionable ideas are hot, while the others are not. In the early ’90s, VOD was fashionable and everyone—Oracle, Microsoft, Sun—was doing VOD. These days “Web services” are hot, so everyone is doing and talking about Web services. If you are out of step with the latest fashion in the tech industry, the tech analysts say nasty things about you and you don’t get your picture on the cover of magazines.
