David Moschella

This year's U.S. presidential race pits two lawyers against two oil men, not one of whom has ever shown any real interest in the IT industry, its promise, its challenges or its future.

Starting a few years ago, we were all supposed to laugh at the dot-coms. How could anyone ever have believed, let alone invested in, their pie-in-the-sky theories and imaginary business plans? Surely, after the collapse of the Internet bubble, we would all come back to our senses, and normal patterns of business leadership would resume.

For more than 50 years, IT customers have complained that their suppliers do a poor job of building standardized, interoperable products. Over the next decade, we will find out if the IT user community can do the job any better.

One of the great ironies of modern business is that while it's only natural for companies to cut back and be cautious during market downturns, these are also the times when the greatest competitive gains are usually made.

In the 1980s, when many manufacturers were closing U.S. plants and exporting jobs overseas, how did you feel? Did you ever think that, as painful as it all was, the resulting economic, cultural and personal upheaval simply wasn't your problem, that this was something that happened to other, older industries, and that it was really just the normal forces of capitalism at work?

Has the IT industry lost faith in itself? In April, Larry Ellison told The Wall Street Journal that the computer industry