■"Silicon Valley grows up: Technology industry seems to be stabilizing, maturing," by Michelle Kessler, USA Today, 12 October 2005, p. 1B.

You know all the stories of the crazy, hazy days of the dot.com boom, when companies spent money like water on all sorts of nonsense. Well, I missed all that by joining Enterra way too late.

Actually, it was always too late for any Enterra employee, born as it was in the aftermath of 9/11 and reflecting CEO Steve DeAngelis' belief that the private sector had it within its power to help not just itself but the government get better at connecting dots and creating a common management space that unites compliance requirements, security standards, information integration and performance metrics. With sector-defining goals like that, you don't waste money, so I've managed to join the most cost-conscious info tech start-up company in history.

I'm 0 for 2 in this regard: I got to the defense industry right after the go-go years of the Reagan buildup came to a halt and I join the IT industry way too late for the dot.com boom, seemingly joining a corporate culture that believes in making amends, karma-like, for past sins in other lives. I mean, Enterra is full of people with lots of past IT industry experience, and like my Center for Naval Analyses colleagues back in the 1990s, these guys can provide plenty of stories of industry excess (they talk about it like people remembering their sordid youthful exploits, wistfully shaking their heads). Now, it's like we're all doing penance. Sure, we pay for talent, but don't ever expect to fly first class or get to see what the inside of a mini-bar looks like. And if I listen to DeAngelis give his speech about being good stewards of our investors money one more time, I've going to interrupt him and finish it myself, because I have that one memorized.

Once, just once, I'd like to hit an industry during its completely foolish phase!

It's just the Catholic in me: I wanna sin before I do penance Ö

Then again, it's more fun to work for a real company in a real industry. Watching Enterra's CTO Doug Todd run us new employees through a live demo of our signature technologies yesterday is a lot more exciting than breathing in the vapors of some make-believe software. No sir, no vaporware for me--or apparently for an industry that's grown up big-time.

Too much time spent with real warfighters to be peddling anything that I don't deeply believe in. Life is too short, reputation is too precious, and the responsibility is too great to expect anything less.