The coming Tech Crunch

Good summary article by Charles Arthur in the Grauniad on what The Crunch means to the Technology sector. In a nutshell:

- Consumer stuff, especially expensive geek jewellery like Apple purvey, will suffer (hence the Apple stock price dive earlier this week)
- pay-by-the-drink (rental) rather than bought infrastructure will be more popular - more Cloud hype is a cert
- Open Source (free) stuff will be more popular, at the expense of (paid for) stuff. We expect to see growth in companies that can support OS systems as well
- Big tech companies with lots of cash in the bank will win most of the games, as cash becomes king again

We also hope that small niche consultancies (ie like us) do fairly well in tough times, as clients are less willing to use full time staff or high cost brand names.

Anyway, for startups, its not all doom & gloom though. Charles notes:

...it might - ironically enough - be slightly easier than before to get venture capital cash. That's because the people who have money need to find somewhere to invest it. Gold? Oil? US Treasury bonds? All are a rollercoaster right now. Finding a company with a really good idea and business plan - preferably not reliant only on advertising - looks, by contrast, like an excellent way to make money.

Having been through a few Tech recessions, and run a company through the last one,I'd say this is pretty sound advice. Especially the Advertising. The downwave world is all about productivity, efficiency and other cost reducing techniques.

The one thing I do think he missed is this:

- Sell to companies that have money, and / or in industries that are growing
- Make the stuff that customers say they want and will pay for, not what you think they want

Also, its a good thing to be on the "dis-aggregator" end of any disaggregation going on, in tough times people start to implement new, unproven stuff if it promises large cost savings whereas in easy times the tendency is to not fix wot ain't broke.