This industry has become so incommunicative that the result is information constipation. Fear of shareholder lawsuits in this post-Enron economy has pushed companies to lock down information to just the party line, available from only a handful of approved spokespeople who cannot talk unless they are in the presence of public relations managers.

The whole thing has become so absurd that it is already an old, tired joke when anyone starts a conference presentation with a PowerPoint slide densely packed with 9-point text offering a "disclaimer about forward-looking statements." Maybe it's best just to not say anything at all.

But as any student of human nature will tell you, if you push down in one place, something will pop up elsewhere. A climate of official silence breeds a desire for people to speak out as unnamed sources.

The leaks outrage and scare corporate heads, their pay and security tied as they are to stock prices and SEC investigations. So the bosses step up measures to plug the holes in the bursting dam. They hire investigators, check phone records, send tracer e-mails, conduct surveillance, sift through garbage.

Before long, the secret elephant has become so big he busts out of the room. Then there is plenty of salacious material for every inquiring mind to jaw about. But not much of real substance gets said.

Hewlett-Packard is not that different from any other Type A company in electronics today. The info lockdown is just as scrupulously maintained at Cisco, Dell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and on and on.

It's ironic, though, because once upon a time the PC industry was a small and freewheeling collection of people who knew one another and spoke out with candor and often with humor. It had its characters, who were venerated as much as mocked, and its issues were openly moaned and laughed about.

In the salad days of the PC industry, McNealy and Gates and Cannavino and Gates and Jobs and Gates and Ellison and Gates would go at it weekly with wit, passion and more than a few well-torqued one-liners. (The chip industry was the same way in its youth, but that was before my time.)

Lately it's all become too humorless, humanless and unreal. The industry needs to cultivate the courage to step back to the middle ground. It needs to have frank discussions about the issues of the day. Dell's laptops overheat? OK, what's wrong with Sony's batteries? What do we need to do about it? Let's have the discussion.

So, dear chief executives and chairmen of the board, take a chill pill. Let down your hair. Speak from your gut.

Then encourage your employees to do the same. We need open, honest dialogue on technology and market issues to get though these tough times and to the better days that lie somewhere ahead.

(And kudos to Mark Plungy of PR firm Porter Novelli for making the creative connection between the fear of shareholder suits and the rise of blogs.)