Like many, I've grown weary of the media pig-pile of the last month on the dour economic outlook. I've personally felt that the IT press and bloggers have been a bit more restrained than financial and mainstream media on the impact of the credit crisis and recessionary pressures. There's no doubt that companies across numerous industries are making cautionary moves to brace for a difficult market, but in some cases these moves seem to be extreme based upon how the overall economic picture is being portrayed in the media.
I was pleased to see some of my own feelings confirmed to a certain extent by the outlook put forth by George Colony CEO of Forrester. In a blog post on Sunday, he doesn't deny that we're in for a downturn as he uses the "R" word, but he enumerates why feels like this one will be different than the dot com bust. One of the key points he makes is that there is not a tech bubble this time, so there won't be precipitous decline in spending like in 2001-2003. The other major point is that technology is even more pervasive now than even seven years ago, both in terms of how much of companies' operations rely on business technology, as well in how the consumerization of technology have made workers bring many of the technologies they've used personally into companies. Naturally, George generated a good volume of comments to his post, so it's worth perusing those.
An implicit message in this post is that there are always opportunities in any weak market. The smart companies will continue to invest in the right sales and marketing strategies to capture those opportunities.
