"Why this tech recession will be different"

I made my point in January. I wrote "As a buyer of technology, sit down with your budget for the last few years. If the categories and percentages have not changed much and you have not taken advantage of various innovations and price declines and newer vendors, you are doing your organization a huge disservice if you just batten your hatches. In a recession, you should be dramatically transforming your IT budget and sourcing strategy."

George Colony of Forrester makes his this month. It is an optimistic one about the recession actually accelerating innovation projects. "Virtualization, social computing, mobile computing, Green IT, SOA, extended Internet (connecting the physical world to the digital world) are front and center on the agendas of large companies. Will many of these projects get cut back? Yes. But many are part of long-term company plans -- they will persist despite economic slowdowns.

But I already see bigger, incumbent vendors digging in to protect their revenues and margins from older "utility" areas - in "uplifts" for older software releases, in print consumables and roaming mobile charges and outsourced processing and storage. Many, many items which should have been declining nicely for years but continue to crowd out budgets for innovation projects.

If such vendors continue to win, this tech recession may end up being no different from previous ones.  And that would be depressing.