It sure looks as if in the world and region, all things ICT are returning to normal. Shares in e-companies are no longer an anathema. The big market move of the season from a tech perspective, the Google IPO, clawed its way beyond obstacles to achieve figures that appear, all in all, more respectable than some headlines suggested. Earnings at multinational corporations from Cisco Systems to Dell look good – so good that a 5% quarterly drop in performance of Hewlett Packard’s enterprise server and storage division led the company last month to immediately sack three top executives, even as HP’s overall profits were up 9% for the quarter. The big names are also hiring. IBM announced in August that it has 18,000 new jobs on offer to bring its worldwide headcount to 330,000 at the end of 2004 and Microsoft said they would hire 6,000 to 7,000 persons during
