Are the good times back in Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley is rebooting. And this time, the geeks are the ones with the upper hand.

... The marketing plan, business model and sometimes the company itself die, but good technology tends to live on. Think of it as the biz/tech equivalent of the "selfish gene." ... "No one gets too torn up about [failure] in the valley."

Just six years after it was founded by two new graduates of American University, Blackboard Inc. has entered a partnership with Cernet, which provides Internet services to more than 1,000 universities in China, to create a software platform that will allow professors to post course materials, conduct discussions and administer tests online.

Cernet CIO Walter Hu predicted the number of Chinese Blackboard users could possibly reach 20 million within 10 years.

Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun.

Few are the millionaires they expected to be: many are poorer than they were to begin with. Some are still frantically seeking jobs, while others are humbly grateful for finding even ill-suited ones.

"The true reality shock comes from trying to unlearn ways of doing things that you've been socialized into believing were the norm."

"If Webvan had spent as much intellectual and financial capital on finding out what customers wanted, and less on fancy technologies, it might still be around."

A young programmer whose software startup, Nullsoft, was gobbled up by America Online -- and then caused numerous headaches for its corporate parent -- plans to resign after his latest piece of rebel code was pulled from the Internet.

As information technology has grown in power and ubiquity, companies have come to view it as evermore critical to their success; their heavy spending on hardware and software clearly reflects that assumption. Chief executives routinely talk about information technology's strategic value, about how they can use IT to gain a competitive edge.

But ,scarcity, not ubiquity, makes a business resource truly strategic -- and allows companies to use it for a sustained competitive advantage. You gain an edge over rivals only by doing something that they can't.

IT is the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies -- think of the railroad or the electric generator -- that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries. For a brief time, these technologies created powerful opportunities for forward-looking companies.

But as their availability increased and their costs decreased, they became commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they no longer mattered.

That's exactly what's happening to IT, and the implications are profound.

The SEC has widened its probe of AOL Time Warner, investigating the company's former business relationship with PurchasePro, a struggling Las Vegas software firm.

In one unorthodox arrangement, AOL gave $9.5M in cash to PurchasePro for $30M in stock warrants in the firm, and AOL booked the difference -- $20.5M -- as ad and commerce revenue. PurchasePro also bought advertising space from AOL and paid AOL commissions for selling PurchasePro software.