Tech Riches Fade After Wild Decade; Regional Economy Returns to Reality
This is the math of a regional economy correcting itself: Sixteen of the 40 technology companies in the Washington area that first sold stock to the public in the past five years are sold, in bankruptcy or out of business. Many that remain have stock trading at pennies a share.</br></br>Technology businesses created more than 100,000 jobs here from 1995 to 2001, according to an analysis of government statistics by Economy.com. But in the past two years, they have laid off about one- fifth that number.</br></br>The late '90s boom in the business of technology helped create the Washington area as we now know it. Debates over growth in Loudoun County, the construction cranes that dotted the skyline of the Dulles Corridor and even the traffic back-ups on the Capital Beltway are all traceable to the explosion of growth in the private sector.</br></br>Now a local business culture that prized aggressive growth is focused on steady work for steady cash. The flashy telecommunications and software firms are gone or foundering. It's a return, say local business veterans and economists who study the region, to the kind of slow, reliable economic expansion that Washington had for decades.</br></br>"I think we'll be returning to steady growth in all the sectors of this marketplace, rather than the meteoric growth in a single sector we had during the late '90s," said John R. Tydings, who headed the Greater Washington Board of Trade for three decades before becoming a consultant last year.