I came to TechRepublic almost ten years ago during the Internet Gold Rush era. As many of you may remember, the DotCom bubble burst in the early 2000s, and the entire Internet industry hit the skids. Companies that were worth hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared seemingly overnight. Even CNET, which wound up acquiring TechRepublic at the top of the bubble, saw its stock price go from the high $80 range down to a mere 69 cents.
As the Internet industry started to recover, the same thing happened to the general economy. It’s at such a massive scale that the press is even talking about whether this means the end of American capitalism and if we need the Chinese to save the world. Certainly at some point the panic and perceptions of doom wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, but there’s no doubting that these aren’t fun times for business.
At a more microeconomic level, as IT leaders we have more to deal with the worry of whether our companies will fail and we’ll be out of work. We also have to face the consequences of the credit industry drying up and the effects it will have on our IT budgets. In a time when businesses can’t borrow to meet payrolls, funding an IT project becomes an additional problem.
Has it affected you yet?
How’s your organization holding out so far? Has the economic meltdown affected your business in general or caused you to rethink any of your IT projects?
