CNN Money has an article by Michael Copeland and Om Malik:
A new technology boom of potentially unprecedented power and durability is spawning in all of the nation’s tech centers from Palo Alto to Seattle to Austin to New York.
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The tech industry in many ways is following the classic arc of boom-and-bust cycles produced by transformative technologies of the past, from the steam engine to electricity to the automobile. Each time, the revolutionary technologythe Internet, in today’s casebrought a burst of new enterprises that were just too early and got wiped out by brutal consolidation.
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For now, most Web ad spending is going to the big players, steadily adding to their accumulation of scads of cash. Google is sitting on more than $7 billion; Yahoo has about $3.5 billion. Microsoft remains the cash king with almost $40 billion on hand. A lot of that money will be earmarked for strategic objectivesacquisitions, say. But a good chunk of it will be spent in other ways, creating a slipstream that will pull many other companies along and provide strong impetus to the boom.