Intel Corp did its best to play party-pooper on Tuesday, interrupting Wall Street's four-day rally with a warning that the fourth quarter is unlikely to bring a cheery Christmas.
'The economy is still not recovering in our industry,' chief financial officer Andy Bryant said.
It shouldn't be unexpected that jitters about corporate earnings were responsible for bringing investors back to earth, and it shouldn't be surprising that these fears centred on the technology sector.
For all the talk of overcapacity and cheap competition from Asia, for the household sector at least, the reason the sector is mired in recession is because technology spending has plummeted.
We're not buying more technology because, having gorged ourselves on personal digital assistants and net-enabled this and wireless that in the 1990s, there really isn't anything worth buying - the consumer is full up and doesn't want his wafer-thin mint.
In the mid-1990s, we all ran out to buy Windows 95, which promised a new operating system that did away with the more confusing aspects of its predecessor, Windows 3.1, and brought the Microsoft experience closer to that of Apple.
Windows 95 was more than a disk in a box: it was a sleek marketing juggernaut, launched just before the enthusiasm for all things technology reached fever pitch, and it worked. It worked for the computing industry too because the 200 megahertz processor, four megabytes of memory and 70 megabyte hard-drive requirements were simply too much for most beige boxes, and many users were forced to upgrade their systems.
