February 11, 2008 2:00 PM PST
IT spending set to fall, find IDC and Forrester
Some believe that a recession won't hit IT hard, but IDC and Forrester are now projecting significant declines in the growth of IT spending in 2008. IDC is pegging global IT market growth of $1.38 trillion, or 5 percent (down from 6 percent growth in 2007), while Forrester sees the IT market growing by 6 percent instead of the 9 percent it had been projecting.
Andrew Bartels, Forrester Research vice president, said the firm's forecast is based on a "mild recession in the U.S. economy in the first two to three quarters of 2008," adding that there is no certainty that the U.S. economy will in fact experience a recession.
I don't see it. Everything feels like a harder recession than the analysts are projecting. The fact that the analysts keep revising downward their projections is an indication that they don't really have a clear idea of just how bad it could be.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
