But on the shelf directly above the book, the latest issue of Red Herring featured an ethereal picture of Jagdeep Singh of Infinera, holding a ball of light in his hands. Inside, the author breathlessly related how Infinera was on the verge of major breakthroughs in the integration of photonic components on a silicon substrate.

I have no reason to doubt Infinera's claim, and can't blame the company's venture firm for wanting an exclusive on the cover of the financial industry's favorite soapbox. But there were some problems with the story: Infinera would not tell the author precisely which photonic elements for a switching subsystem they had integrated on silicon, and, more important, there was no attempt to place the advances into context with work done by the likes of Agere, Bookham, OMM, NanoOpto and others.

Isn't it time the surviving remnants of the technology press resolved to give up context-free promotion of a new technology, once and for all? Whatever the subject, the days of a lone inventor or sole company realizing a breakthrough akin to Tom Edison's are probably gone for good. When worthy advances are made in a field, it's the result of thousands of incremental steps being made by scores of companies, and the failure to place events in a larger context is a gross disservice to the smaller companies that might be ignored.

Two more wrinkles are added in the current economic environment: Venture firms are rejecting funding for many startups in the communications field, if their "radical breakthroughs" require greenfield deployments or replacement of legacy equipment. To add insult to injury, many investors now want to submit ideas to a service provider "smell test." If the idea is tossed to the customer and gets a lukewarm reception, it goes nowhere. In today's environment, customers of OEMs have such high smell-test barriers, 90 percent of all great concepts might as well bear the aroma of cow flop.

It is our duty in the technical press to cover research breakthroughs fairly, even as we show how the real advancements take place through a matrix of scores of small steps forward.