Ah, how soon they forget! The recession of the early 1980’s (admittedly deeper than any we’re likely to face now) was the biggest single catalyst in the death of pay-as-you-go commercial timesharing and the birth of the modern DP department.

January 25th marked Pluto’s entrance into Capricorn, a time when we can expect the collapse — what new economy consultants BubbleGeneration have referred to as the “macropocalyse” — to accelerate, a……

I was very lucky in the early 90’s being in an industry that was not only shielded from recession, in fact it was thriving.  Corporate America was taught to fight their way out of the slump by Business Process Reengineering, and what better …

We are getting passed the buzz factor of 2.0 so hopefully this will help them all see value.

As belts tighten I think that people will be even more likely to look to online alternatives to solving their business problems. @Sridhar Vembu’s comment about Salesforce and Webex thriving during the last downturn is spot on.

Chris
Paglo - The Search Engine for IT

Erick Schonfeld’s post today Belt-Tightening In Corporate IT Spending Will be Good For Web 2.0, is right on, with a few caveats. Software as a service is cheaper upfront and requires little to no maintenance, however corporate IT depts. are…

In the past, big companies would only consider Microsoft products for pretty everything, but now they are more open to other sources. Looking at Drupal, 5 years ago, no one knows about it. Nowadays, tons of sites including the a few Universal Studio sites are on it.

Karel Lukas
Yugma

When we hear Web 2.0, most of us think Facebook, Flickr, Digg… I imagine that’s not what Erick is talking about here.

The point is that recession will be good for SAAS, and more generally for “IT-AAS”, and that can only be good news for Enterprise 2.0. Having said that, I agree with Max; enterprise 2.0 needs to grow up if it wants to play with the big boys (aka enterprises). Really a good opportunity for all.

Actually I wouldn’t be suprised to see a rush of 2.0-ish acquisitions by big IT shops. GigaOM highlighted that EMC launched an enterprise version of online backup service Mozy (http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/01/26/weekend-coffee-break-5/). Now *that’s* what I’m talking about!

It is not an all or nothing proposition: adopting a suite like Zoho doesn’t mean abandoning or throwing away the investment already made. With our MS Office plug-in that is exactly the message we are touting - don’t throw away, augment. Adoption can be very tactical and very gradual. And that business-at-the-margins is more than sufficient for new vendors to thrive - at the time of their acquisition by Cisco, WebEx was pulling in about $250 million a year, which wouldn’t qualify as a rounding error for Microsoft, but a nice chunk of change for a new company.

Sridhar Vembu
Zoho

I would venture to say that they are going to use existing software and licenses people are trained for more efficiently, and try to run them to the bone or simply delay upgrade fees.

How do you even think about comparing Dell, IBM, Oracle with the puny likes of Facebook, MYSpace, and Youtube in terms of business software. Most of the people usig these site really could care less about business. They’re there to
“hook up”. Geez……

because the whole ad-supported model is not sustainable

(unless of course producers of products increase at a faster rate than commentators on producers of products… think that will happen?)

And as evolution goes, when environmental changes take place, only the “evolved” species will remain on the scene.

I wrote more about it here http://technozzle.com/?p=61

If someone wants appls like these, I always point them to open-source products, like OpenOffice… Until Microsoft responds to the requirements of their customers, instead of their boardroom, I’ll keep re-directing their customers to open-source apples… Speaking of Apple(s), XP is my last MS/OS… I’ve had the MS-ring in my nose for 25 years and I never even considered buying an Apple, because I could not afford one, until now. If I must get training, new appls and more hardware, I cannot think of a better time to consider what Steve Jobs is making, these days… OS/X.

The reality is that for many organizations, the cost of re-training will be less than the ongoing licensing costs paid to Microsoft. When the costs are extrapolated over three years, organizations will begin to wake up to the fact that Microsoft has been milking them for decades, and that even with all the re-training costs, they will save money by migrating to another solution such as Google Apps, OpenOffice.org, or perhaps even IBM’s Lotus Symphony product.

http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

Companies like Salesforce will thrive!