Slashdot Mirror
How Does a Poor Economy Affect Tech Innovation?
sshuber writes "It's no secret that the US and other parts of the world are currently having some economic problems. How is this affecting new technologies under development? With the large numbers of layoffs, are we seeing projects, such as things under R&D, that are being axed? Are companies playing it safe and sticking with what they know sells in lieu of pushing the envelope? Finally, how is this affecting the open source community, either positively or negatively?" A lot of open source work happens with the backing or at least the sufferance of corporations. Do laid-off tech workers contribute fewer cycles to open source projects, or more?
...my productivity on pretty much everything taken a huge nosedive.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I would expect at least some laid off workers to do some open source work just to keep their skillset current.
Aside from tremors, China is doing fantastic. India is much the same. Europe is doing pretty much the same. Russia is recovering nicely from their economic doldrums.
I would guess that there are far fewer people worldwide living in poverty today than there were 10, or even 5, years ago, despite some speculative food price run-ups.
However, disparity of wealth distribution isn't even the point in contention (no one disputes that it is a real problem). This submission is quite clearly playing upon the current "the economy is in the gutter" meme, but it just isn't supported by the numbers. Things aren't great, and there's some bouncing atop a potential recession, but it's actually remarkably robust given some of the inputs over the past couple of years, which many expected to yield much worse conditions.
So what you're saying is, either it will effect tech or it won't? You must be an economist.
The first thing you want to do when you're belt tightening is cut jobs; employees are huge overhead. But how do you cut jobs when the work still has to be done?
Answer? Automation. If you can't automate, you'll outsource, and outsourcing itself often requires new technology.
When the bubble popped, a lot of tech people took it in the shorts, and since that's the last big economic wobble, it's the one everyone is thinking about. But in reality there is no guarantee that a downturn will be bad for tech, or tech industries...It depends on what sectors experience the lowest growth. (Sadly, I do economics too.)
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Employment for health care and IT is still very strong. If you were a HELOC pimp, you're in trouble; but you never really contributed anything to the economy in the first place, so count yourself lucky and go get a real job.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Look around you, Linux adoption is higher then ever. Ubuntu has made Linux easy, Dell has Linux installed on normal PCs (along with some other computer makers), the gPC is many times sold out at Wal-Mart, the eeePC with Linux is quite popular, and the use of Linux-based tablets such as the N800 is on the increase. Never before could you get Linux so easily, it still isn't as common to walk into a large retailer and find computers pre-installed with Linux but if you spend 5 minutes hunting around, Linux is easy to find.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Or lose their arses completely when they're feeding that record high price corn to their pigs, which are not getting that great of $$ from the market.
Can all fish swim?
I like how people are saying the drop in housing prices is a terrible thing. It's immediately bad for those people wanting to sell houses, but it's a fantastic opportunity for people like me who live in apartments and may want to invest in a house.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The term "poor economy" can be, and has in the past been, a self fulfilling prophecy.
If the population believes the economy is poor, and they behave as though the economy is poor, then the economy, regardless of its actual state, will, by the actions of the brainwashed masses, begin to behave as though it were poor.
That appears to be exactly what is happening here.
This is an excellent point. Any situation will bear golden opportunity for some. For every period of expansion, there will always be some period of recession that follows. During the expansion time, you see innovation in "newsworthy" areas -- new, cutting edge products that are years out from being monetized. During recession periods, the innovation shifts to less exciting areas -- efficiency improvements, etc.
Look at the paid search space. It was most likely an inevitability that the market would gravitate toward a pay-per-click model. Make no mistake about it, though -- the dot com crash greatly contributed to that industry's meteoric rise. Because of the bad taste left by the dot com bubble, ad dollars shifted to services where payment could be directly tied to performance.
There is no "year of the Linux desktop", there is only a gradual increase of Linux and decrease of Windows. We are seeing that happen very quickly, there won't be a sudden release of Ubuntu that makes everyone convert to Linux, but there will be a slow change to Linux and it is happening as I type this.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.