Truth is, there probably wouldn't have been a revolution if nobody showed up.
Truth is, there are always more revolutionaries after a revolution than during one.
As the Information Revolution evolves into the Information Age, it seems like everybody from Washington to Wall Street is looking to grab a piece of the pie, not to mention credit for the recipe. Lack of timely recognition may even have saved the lives of revolutionaries past, but that brings no comfort to executives trying to run an industry that needs to generate tens of billions of dollars of capital each year just to stay afloat. If there's one thing these companies need, it's recognition, and they can't wait for the history books. The severe industry downturn of 1998 gave some semiconductor equipment suppliers the chance to prove their increasing resilience. Two cycles ago, for instance, Applied Materials' stock traded as low as one times book value at the trough of the cycle, equity research analysts noted, versus the more recent slide in which it traded at three or four times book value.