There is no new new thing. A funk has settled over the U.S. technology industry. It's not just the little matter of crashing market values of so many tech companies. Not even the palpable sense that a fantastic and thrilling financial bubble has burst.
Money is only part of the trouble.
The other pieces were evident this week at Agenda, an influential, CEO-laden technology conference set here at the luxurious Phoenician resort. The industry seems to have stalled. The technology that is the basis for the Web, HTML, might have hit the upper limits of what it can do. And Silicon Valley's near-monopoly on tech innovation is in danger of getting whittled back by Europe, Japan and Israel. This year, there was little new and almost nothing that got everybody talking.