Recession recedes; Small tech vendors to suffer
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 02 April 2009, 19:23 IST   |    9 Comments
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California: As the world market has started showing signs of the ending of a recession that has been biting the global economy badly, small vendors who buy and sell technology at a cheap price after long and tedious bargains are going to suffer. Reason: Good time comes with good prices. For Gene Marks, owner of the Marks Group, which sells customer relationship, service, and financial management tools to small and midsize businesses, this recession seems to be turning around. He writes the market's been rising and houses are beginning to sell. Durable orders are up. Banks are detoxifying. Bernie Madoff and Jim Cramer have been publicly humiliated. In an article appeared in BusinessWeek, he wonders whether this is the beginning of the end of the economic downturn . As a business owner who buys and sells technology, the author thinks the end of the recession marks the end of some pretty good times for him. However, the article does not turn its back against the knee-jerk mass layoffs of good employees by profitable companies like Microsoft. Many of small scale vendors with a few bucks left in the bank have been picking up bargains galore. The global demand slowdown has depressed manufacturing costs and fueled a surge in unsold inventories. And many have been witnessing their negotiating power exponentially increasing. Hardware salesmen make sympathetic clucking sounds and whip out their erasers. Software reps, never known to show much spine, simply cave. Another gift of the recession is that it has been ridding the world of crappy tech companies and crappy technology. Circuit City, the world's worst place to buy just about anything, is finally out of business. The downturn also has rendered frugal business owners rock stars. The guys running the oldest version of Windows are no longer ridiculed. The guys trying out competing, cheaper operating systems, such as Linux, are now taken more seriously. Weeklong conferences are now one-day seminars. Dozens of servers are being virtualized down to a box or two. One-day seminars are now one-hour Webinars. Blogs are now becoming tweets - all due to the so-called slowdown. The recession has also put an end to the talks about the green technology. When times are tough, no one wants to think about saving the environment. They are more concerned about saving their butts. The only green that is important right now is what is left in one's bank account. In good times, when things were flush, software vendors would try to sell us on features we knew we would never use. But now people will buy things if they really need it. Return on investment has taken lead now. The author wails that all of this will change as the economy improves. 'Cool' technology will be the rage again. ROI will lose its appeal. More stupid dot-coms will vie for our attention.

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