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 chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
