“”It has been personally very frustrating to have such a large portion of our ISP [Internet service provider] base deteriorate so quickly,” said Chuck Minn, chairman and co-founder of Covad, the largest competitive Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) carrier. Fully 26 percent of Covad’s installed base is connected through “troubled” ISPs, while another 32 percent is with “at-risk” ISPs. While it already had to re-report its
third-quarter earnings downward $10.4 million due to these problems, Covad last week projected that it would earn $20 million to $25 million less than the $85 million it was projecting for the fourth quarter.

“These [wholesalers] are really in life support mode, and there’s nothing they can do,” said Adam Giansiracusa, managing director of technology stocks at Frost Securities. He explained that all of the carriers are trying to get themselves to profitability by scaling back and not growing too quickly, since their ISP customers are performing so poorly.”

“…covad has just informed us of your telephone delivery date…”

“…Your circuit order 824414 has been successfully delivered and tested with the local telco and you have been scheduled for a Covad installation…’

“… Your Covad install is swiftly approaching! …”

0. pick up the phone
1. dial 1.800.555.TELL
2. after introduction say “extensions”
3. say or dial 32523

“”Both local papers, in their own ways, exercise judgments that undermine their credibility. The [San Francisco Chronicle’s] technology coverage harps on the same tired theme of amazement. My God, says the local paper, look at the wizards and their wonders. The Chron should justrun the same daily headline: “More Cool Stuff From Those Young People in Palo Alto.” The [Mercury News] regards the area’s newly wealthy as curiosities from another planet. The Merc’s recurring headline would say, “They’re Rich. They’re Young. What Does It Mean for People Who Are Poor Like Us?”” “One former editor at the Merc once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at a banquet, but couldn’t bring himself to say a word to the billionaire. He told me later he didn’t know what to say to Ellison, whom he noted was at the time the wealthiest man in Silicon Valley.

How is it possible for an editor to be so awed by power, money or influence that he could not even shake another man’s hand? Such insecurity in the face of the area’s increasing wealth and sophistication is a sad commentary on the people who should be telling the valley’s stories””

“The technology boom has been called the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.
Maybe so, but that’s not the whole story.

As the events of 2000 have shown, it’s also been the greatest legal con game of all time.”

“My own profession bears a share of responsibility for the debacle. Journalists served more as stenographers than skeptical observers while technology executives, public-relations people, market “analysts” and other self-serving participants in the con talked up the New Economy and insisted that some fundamental laws of economics had been repealed.

We celebrated the 21-year-old billionaire of the week. We raved about companies with tiny revenues and no prospect of earnings as the harbinger of a new world, when the newly rediscovered reality was firmly rooted in old truths.”

“You know that XML lets you invent your own tags, and that it lets you impose some structure on your data. Beyond that, though, your knowledge of XML is somewhat vague. Improvising hastily, you reply “The data is nicely structured, and the tags are meaningful. The indentation makes it easy to read, too.””

“All those restless hackers, busy twisting the English language up and down with their obscure puns, busy donating their energy to public projects and passions — they’re still out there, following their coding stars. Their curiosity helped build the Internet, helped make code like Linux, BSD and Perl flourish to the point that the commercial world had to take notice.

But now that the commercial world is no longer quite as obsessed, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. They’ve just turned their energies toward even cooler stuff…”