

The Collapse of High-Tech is Killing the Economy - fchollet
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-collapse-of-high-tech-is-killing-the-economy-2014-03-07

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adventured
I don't believe this is an entirely honest appraisal of the situation. I
seriously doubt the correlation between IT spending and productivity gains is
the same today as it was in 1978 or 1988. Open source software has boomed
since the late 1990s, that alone would be enough to meaningfully reduce IT
software spending growth. The cost of hardware, the value you get for it, and
the inability of most businesses to tax even old hardware, explains a huge
drop in IT equipment spending growth.

Also, the rise of and combination of various technologies has eliminated
entire sections of the hardware field. Fax machines, copiers, printers,
cameras, landlines (and related networks), expensive storage, complex
intranets, expensive database systems, the need to upgrade corporate PCs every
few years, uber expensive department software, and on and on it goes - all of
these things have been impacted head-on or eliminated by the rise of cheap
hardware, smart phones, open source software, and cloud services. As a simple
example, how much storage do I need for docs in a small business network? That
need hasn't expanded at even a fraction of the pace of storage.

Simply put, you can now spend drastically less, and get drastically more for
it, than you could in 1998.

The drop in IT spending growth is not killing the economy. That's like saying:
if we just spent money we don't need to, it'd fix things (break some
windows!).

