I can’t wait for summer to be over. This has been one dull season for the tech industry. First, potentially the most exciting deal of all – Microsoft-Yahoo – fell apart because of incompetence and timidity on both sides. Then EA failed in its efforts to revive its stagnant games business by buying Take Two Interactive, creator of the controversial and, not coincidentally, extremely lucrative Grand Theft Auto series.

There are no exits. With the stock market reeling from the twin blows of the credit crunch and oil prices, nobody in their right mind is going for an IPO. In the tech biz, which likes to pretend money is not important, being able to cash out is important for investors as well as burned-out founders. The IPO market was just beginning to sizzle when disaster struck and now everyone’s gone on hold. That means venture capitalists have to hunker down, keep putting money in a lot of dubious companies and pray for the world economy to come back.

M&A deals continue to happen, but there’s been nothing earthshaking this summer. It’s hard to get worked up about AMD selling its set top box ambitions to Broadcom, when nobody’s shown that large numbers of consumers, or broadcasters, want to abandon the cable box for something more complicated from Microsoft or HP.

Boredom in the tech world isn’t limited to the U.S. VCs are busy as bees in China and India. But most of their investments right now are for me-too products that serve the vast local markets. It’s less important, at least in those two countries, to innovate or gear your launch from the start to sell abroad. China’s 1.3 billion can’t get enough of social networks, dating sites and auctions. The 400-million strong mobile phone market promises to pay handsomely for a catchy app. The India play is all mobile because in this nation of one billion people, phones are vastly more important than PCs.

Europe, a single market in name only, continues to create smart little companies, but they tend to focus on one or two countries and have modest goals. But then, raising money is a lot harder for European entrepreneurs. Last year, European VCs doled out $7.75 billion to startups vs. nearly $30 billion in the U.S. A poll of French college students a couple of years ago reported that more than 60 percent aspired to be civil servants. Maybe it’s because there are still too few success models. You can’t keep mentioning Business Objects, the last European startup to grow to a billion dollars in sales, (It has since been acquired by Oracle) or Skype, which eBay took over for $2.6 billion in 2005.

The biggest reason for the lack of excitement is the absence of a new paradigm people can get worked up about. The tech industry thrives on slogans and images. For a while it was social networks. Then it was Web 2.0. Most recently it’s been “cloud computing,” but that’s always been a little too vague to drive investment. The hottest tech conferences there days aren’t about ideas but product demos. The industry desperately needs some new thinking.

The business also needs to figure out how to make money. Since about 1995, profitability has been downgraded. That was one cause of the tech bubble, companies that burned through investors’ money without a clue about how to make money. In recent years, VCs have argued that they are far more demanding of the companies they back. But that doesn’t explain why 200 social networking companies got funded in 2007. Or why the results of the big Internet businesses like Yahoo and Amazon don’t show much profit margin.

But then there’s probably nothing more boring to techies than a discussion of business models. They’d rather pitch the next Big Thing that is going to change the world. Well, with summer over and the VCs heading back from the beach, I’m praying that some of that sandy meditation has resulted in fresh ideas for a more exciting fall.