The strange love affair with tech for so many of our readers is a tad unnerving to me. With the exception of Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) and, for a while, Research In Motion (RIMM), for most of this century tech has done nothing, made you no money, created no value.

But the love affair persists, and I find it quite bizarre. What's the point of it? Why do we focus, for example, endlessly on Apple, when for all we know Steve Jobs is sick and the quarter's as bad as RIMM's?

Why do we focus on Google when, after all, it is ad-supported and the ad market is in a severe depression. It is a cyclical decline, so when it gets better, Google will take share, but clearly there are better bargains out there.

Why do we focus on Google when, after all, it is ad-supported and the ad market is in a severe depression. It is a cyclical decline, so when it gets better, Google will take share, but clearly there are better bargains out there.

Nothing even remotely exciting is happening in tech. Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC) have been remarkable duds.

Nothing even remotely exciting is happening in tech. Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC) have been remarkable duds.

There is nothing intriguing about Oracle (ORCL).

I like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), but only because it is doing a big restructuring because of its acquisition of EDS, and I believe that Dell (DELL) may be falling apart.