NET RESULTS: It's easy to tell when January has rolled around again in Silicon Valley, writes Karlin Lillington.
Apple chief executive and co- founder Steve Jobs's grinning face is guaranteed to be on newspaper front pages and the evening news.
Why? MacWorld, the annual Apple computer geek-out and love-in, takes place every January in San Francisco. MacWorld is an annual event in the Golden State for the Mac faithful, those who stood by their Apple Mac computers even - or perhaps especially - when the company looked like it would fold any nanosecond.
The highlight of MacWorld is the keynote speech on day one by Jobs - one of the tech world's great showmen. He always has a product to announce and quite often, as with the iMac computer, it is one that becomes tremendously influential.
The way in which he will dramatically reveal the product - always a flamboyant show - and the product itself, is the subject of much speculation among Mac fans.
People queue for hours to get into the keynote. The media here loves to report it. Apple is a very "Valley" story, as with Hewlett-Packard, a tale of garage-to-riches for its founders. Then, lots of desperate ups and downs and a succession of chief executives. Some great products. Some real clangers.
And, through it all, an incredibly loyal user base for whom MacWorld is the ardfheis of techdom. Sure, it's ridiculously overblown and the fans often seem to be visiting from some other planet - not necessarily one with intelligent life forms. But it's great fun and endearingly surreal, if you like that sort of thing. I do.
These days Apple is, if not exactly robust, at least off the ventilator, mainly due to Jobs's dynamic leadership since returning to head the company a few years ago. Apple has managed to carve a more stable niche by defining what it does more clearly.
The company streamlined product lines and focused on delivering value.
Apple has also retained a dominant role in the education market in the US (52 per cent of it) and a strong position in "creative" areas such as graphic design, digital music and film production.
And, by God, they've done a fine job of revolutionising the way we view a computer as an aesthetic object. With the introduction of the colourful iMac, Apple banished the unwritten rule that said all computers must come in a bland putty-coloured rectangular box.
Good design always drives broader trends and the iMac kicked off a wider obsession with having colourful, see-through plastic casings on everything from calculators to printers to telephones.
Now the iMac has evolved again. It looks like a near cousin of the anglepoise lamp, with a little round base and a flat-screen monitor jutting out on an adjustable arm. It doesn't even look like a computer. Analysts seem to like the prices, which have been kept low - this is, after all, an entry-level computing product. The consensus seems to be that it's pretty cool.
And thus, there was Jobs this week, all over the TV screens and newspapers, beaming next to his new baby. It's January.
MacWorld and the new iMac were one of several positive technology stories in a week that seemed to cautiously hint at a growing recovery in the battered tech sector.
Compaq had a good quarter to report and the semiconductor industry, which is the spinning weathervane for the entire tech sector, says production and demand is increasing for chipmakers.
I also found particularly interesting a recent report which revealed that some 537 internet companies either collapsed or went into bankruptcy in the US in 2001. That nearly doubled the dotcom deaths of 2000, which numbered 225, according to Webmergers.com, a San Francisco firm that has tracked the flame-outs. But only 21 companies died in November and again in December, suggesting the sectoral clear-out is coming to an end.
And while many have seen the dotbomb phenomenon as an indication of the doomed silliness of a whole sector, that's not the case. Despite the media frenzy that suggested internet companies were about as viable as the dodo, Webmergers.com estimates that some 7,000 to 10,000 Net companies continue to ply their trade.
If so, about 10 per cent of the industry went bust; not too bad really for such a young medium.
On the other hand, the effects of the severe downturn in the tech industry continue to reverberate through the Valley.
I had lunch this week with a friend who works in one of the older and more stable corners of what is, of course, an exceedingly broad technology church. Over that Valley mainstay, a lunch of sushi, he told me that people have been moving out of the area in droves.
"I'd go down to my local coffee joint and sit at a table and just watch the vans from U-Haul \a removal truck rental company stream by," he says. "Once stock options became basically worthless, who could afford to live here? You have to know you're going to get some kind of return."
I drove him back to his office, past once-mighty network equipment company Juniper. It has just completed a third shiny building of a headquarters it cannot now fill, post-redundancies.
One of the three is used, one lies empty, blinds closed over the windows, and who knows what the company will do with the new building, says my friend.
Only two years ago, many employees inside were very, very wealthy - but on paper. We turned at the corner where internet giant Yahoo has what my friend, with a dry laugh, said the company called its "world headquarters".
Yahoo, too, built a flashy complex to house employees it either never hired or laid off. The company name is only on one building. Another, says my friend, sits unoccupied. He looked in through the windows recently and it seemed to be used for storage.
Building vacancy rates are at painful levels. In San Francisco, 46 per cent of buildings in the area south of Market Street which housed many tech and internet companies are empty - compared to 10 per cent in December 2000. Rents have declined from $67 per square foot to $22. Ouch!
Things will rebound; everyone knows that. But by all accounts, the wait sure is hard.
