There's a double perversity, though, in insisting that one spots fresh green shoots right after the market has taken one of the most precipitous falls since April 2000. How can any tenuous recovery survive a NASDAQ shrinking to microscopic levels?

We begin by making the assumption that the stock market no longer reflects business conditions on the ground. The stunning lack of investor confidence relates to specific cases of corporate malfeasance, not to how inventories are being worked off.

If we walk through the charred and nearly barren landscape, we see some interesting little buds pushing through the soil: Rick Merritt, focusing on storage-area networks, already spied two SAN silicon specialists in early July: Siverback Systems Inc. and Trebia Networks Inc. The opportunities in managed storage clusters are great enough to ensure there will be more where those two came from.

In the particularly decimated field of photonics, there's still some hopeful newcomers, like sensor/photodiode specialist Oluma Inc. Similarly, even though network processing is a dangerous realm, we're seeing some new money go into frame processing, leading to the official launch of Ample Communications two weeks ago.

We've long believed in the early recovery of high-speed interconnect, and startup SiPackets will be addressing one of these markets with a HyperTransport to PCI bridge. As HT and PCI-Express enter a second surge of new growth, you can bet SiPackets won't be alone.

Might there still be an early freeze if the stock market falls even further? You bet. However, with doomsaying becoming a commodity item in the summer of 2002, it's nice to see a few new leaves on the trees.