John C. Dvorak

It was all over for the newspaper business on April 21, 2001. Not one boxing writer from the major American news organizations covered the Hasim Rahman/Lennox Lewis heavyweight championship fight, which will be remembered as one of the greatest upsets of all time. The group-think disease, which has reached epidemic proportions in the high-technology sector, has finally hit the sports reporting industry.

HBO analyst Larry Merchant chided the media, saying that in years past, the heavyweight champion was always followed by a pack of boxing reporters. Not this time. They all thought the same thing: The fight is going to be uninteresting and lopsided. The challenger is a stiff. So our only source of information was the live broadcast and a few reports that trickled in from various stringers who just happened to be in South Africa anyway. We were robbed of any real insight—if there was any insight to be had.

I dwell on the Rahman/Lewis situation because I was personally annoyed, and it mirrors what happens in the high-tech industry. The media tends to cover the obvious to the point of overkill. Not unlike the Super Bowl, Comdex, CES, CeBIT, and a few other major trade shows in the high-tech arena get more coverage than they deserve. Meanwhile, the press room is empty at the more fundamental, significant, and unique events, such as the IEEE Solid State Circuits Conference.

Reporters in all fields have clearly dropped the ball. Who was kicked off of "Survivor" highlights the eleven o'clock news tease; a twist in the story line of "Friends" is considered news; self-congratulatory awards ceremonies, such as the Emmys and the Oscars, are covered as earth-shattering events.

All this is driven by the paid publicity machines that cater to lazy reporters. The result is more group think. Who really cares that Tom and Nicole have broken up? Or that Rosie adopted a baby?

All societies require some cultural group think, but the need to standardize on certain principles can scale to the point where original thought is dominated by group think. To me, the most interesting aspect of high-tech group think is the conferences designed only to establish the group-thought regimen for the next 12 to 18 months. These conferences should be renamed to something like "Fall Group Think 2001." The same phenomenon was directly responsible for both the Internet boom and the subsequent crash of the dot-com world. Everyone went to the same conferences to be pumped up by the same speakers promoting the same things.

The way it works is so sinister that few trade-show participants even know they are nothing more than group-think stooges. The classic method is through an exclusive conference. Only "qualified" people are invited to attend, and they have to pay upwards of $5,000 for the privilege. Of course, the advantage to them is that they get to meet other suckers who all perceive each other as part of the cultural elite. At the event, there are carefully chosen speakers who pitch some idea backed by dubious information that may indicate a new trend looming—an important trend. The new trend becomes the buzz at the after-event bar and gets reported as gospel in the trade papers. It then cycles back into the group in a kind of forced feedback loop, making the original assertions more powerful. This is how the dot-com boom began and ended.

This group-think mechanism was responsible for the dopey tablet-computing dead end, the short-lived CD-ROM boom, and the failed push for push technology. Very few significant dead-end ideas have independently popped up on the scene outside of this mechanism.

The scary part is that the mechanism is at work right now at a conference somewhere. The lucky reporters who think they are getting away with something because they didn't have to pay feel like "insiders" as they listen to the contrived pitches targeting whatever "dumb money" is attending in hopes of snagging a no-strings-attached deal. The reporters who are usually in touch with gophers, PR flacks, and spokespeople get to chat with the CEO, who is probably the biggest bluffer and hard-ass sales guy in the company. The reporter is sold on the idea that pretty soon all keyboards will have a copper-colored L key—just because! Next thing you know it's reported as a major trend.

Meanwhile, the biggest upset in boxing goes uncovered. I think you get my drift.