Comment Articles

Kewney's tech recession cure: keep on taking the gadgets

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 12 Oct 2001 15:02 BST

Do you fancy dropping out of the urban rat-race, and moving into a small farm in Southern Spain?

I ask because I notice a lot of people saying they would. They've had enough. And it could spoil the high-tech market, rather badly.

The good news is that we're getting to the point where I was predicting that the high-tech market would start recovering - or, at least, stop sinking. Watching companies like Cisco, I feel this is probably right. There's bad news to come, but in the end, IT is central to the way corporations work; if they are to carry on working, they need to upgrade their IT, regularly. I reckon the current slowdown can only last so long... and I think things are going to stop getting worse about now.

But it is also the case that the high-tech sector is walking along the edge of a cliff; and the danger is that toys might become boring.

The toy phenomenon was the biggest single effect of the silicon revolution. Before microprocessors, conspicuous spending was restricted to those who could afford to do it on a large scale - sports cars, fast boats, absurd clothes. Nowadays, however, there is some new gadget to perform some strange new function, every week. And ordinary folks can afford them - phones which talk to you or even listen to what you say; wireless hi-fi headsets; pocket computers loaded with all the day's papers... it seemed endless.

Today, however, there are a lot of people out of work. Not factory hands; people who just spent £30,000 on a new car, and were wondering whether to equip it with a voice-operated navigation unit, but are now wondering if they can possibly keep up the payments.

And a lot of these people are saying: "Heck, I can buy a really nice house in France, with several acres of fertile land, and have plenty of change left over, if I sell the London pad. And I don't even have to give up work!"