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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?
There's a lot of foreboding potential out there, and a lot of big numbers have been lost on the market...but the numbers just don't seem to support that poor of an economy.
Yet, at least.
Nonetheless, everyone keeps talking like the world is in the depths of a worldwide recession.
...my productivity on pretty much everything taken a huge nosedive.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
When gas was 99c/gallon, people weren't all that interested in new fuel technology. Now with oil going up and up, I expect we'll finally start seeing some real break throughs in alternative energy research.
OSS should also benefit from a slower economy. Why pay MS 100k for MSSQL licensing when I can get postgres?
Innovation won't stop and will continue to happen. It just might be in different areas.
We're cutting back on extravagances. I'll probably wait one more year for the new computer I was supposed to get last month.
An economic downturn will kill an already unhealthy company, but a good employer with a stable balance sheet knows how to weather the storm.
It's been pointed out recently to me (at least here in Alberta, Canada), that university enrollment drops when the economy's strong, and picks up when the economy slows. There's at least a couple factors here. One, when the economy's not doing great, a university campus is a relatively secure place to be while you wait out a temporary drought. Secondly, while the economy's doing good, it's generally easy to get a well-paying job, which presents a stronger competition vs the academic route. On that note, the economy's looking pretty rosy up here right now, so we're definitely looking for potential students at the University of Alberta's Computing Science department!
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
My employer let go of 90% of the future projects staff, which equated to 75-90 people. No VoiP, or WiFi in the near future, PC/Laptop refreshes were put on hold, server refresh abandoned, the plan to change the entire server OS on file/print servers from 2000 to 2003 was abandoned...and some other stuff that I can't remember.
I would expect at least some laid off workers to do some open source work just to keep their skillset current.
Have there really been large numbers of layoffs in the tech industries? I thought many tech companies, particularly those with large overseas businesses, were doing pretty well. See IBM for example.
This whole question reeks of someone wanting the Slashdot community to do their research for them, starting with some pretty questionable assumptions. Maybe the answer to this question is better served by looking at how past recessions hit the tech industry and their innovation output.
We're having economic troubles because people are dumb - not because something has actually happened.
"oh woe is me, the housing market is collapsing!" no its not. Now's a great time to buy. In fact this is really the sort of situation that benefits people in their mid-late 20s. Real Estate values were inflated before. Now those people can more easily afford to buy houses.
now, back on topic... if there is any sort of actual shift taking place, it is not likely to be the big corps that want to try and ring every last drop out of "business as usual" who will benefit.
If people perceive times to be tough and getting worse, with regards to the environment, energy "crisis," etc - then the people who can move in and offer solutions to those problems are going to win. They're going to attract the money from the people that have it to get the stuff to market.
I'd like to think that in the next 5-10 years we're going to see a lot more people interested in home power generation -- solar and/or wind, appliances that use less power, etc.
We're also going to see people and companies wanting solutions which provide maximum advantage for minimum cost. That means we'll see a lot more open, standards-based solutions to problems. We're likely to see more foss solutions to software problems, open hardware solutions to hardware problems, etc.
Likewise, if programmers are now no longer employed by megacorp a, they'll likely have a few more hours a day to contribute to foss projects -- or start smaller ventures based on foss solutions to some of the more pressing problems of our day, and into the future.
or maybe i'm just high
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.
What large numbers of layoffs?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I did a lot more, last time I was unemployed.
Partly it's because you can put, "Programmer for (insert OSS project here)" as your current occupation, rather than "sitting on the couch, watching the phone" and partly because the best way to put food on the table is to do some work, and the easiest sort of work to get is freelance work.
When you're freelance, you can't afford the licensing for the nice proprietary stuff. You can't afford to scratch build huge webapps. You absolutely have to jump on the OSS bandwagon, just because it's what you can afford.
And when the OSS app you're deploying turns out to lack some feature that's critical to your sale...You code it. Or you jump on the lists, and beg someone else to code it. Or you incorporate some other OSS project to provide that functionality, etc.
I made more when I was out of work than I do now, but I didn't get to post on Slashdot as much. It's all about how you decide to spend that time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.