The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of technology. But as the dominant companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street.

Title, 35, a new-media manager at a film production company in New York, has dropped his cable TV subscription and moved to watching most of his television online — free. While shopping for a new laptop for his girlfriend recently, he sidestepped more expensive full-featured computers and picked a bare-bones, $200 Asus EeePC laptop, also known as a netbook, made by Asustek of Taiwan.

“We’ve reached one of those moments in tech history when there are low-priced and free alternatives that are both user-friendly and reliable enough to make the switch,” Title said. “Then there’s the extra bonus of saving some cash.”

Silicon Valley — and technology centers elsewhere, like Taiwan — have been gripped by a growing sense that the economic retreat might do more than depress earnings.

There is too much ingrained optimism here to think that the technology sector will not bounce back, stronger than before. But the fear is that consumers like Title, and businesses operating with the same cost-cutting mind-set, will erode the high-margin businesses of the information technology industry — slowing some technologies and companies but giving new momentum to others.

The normally confident Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, expressed this very fear last week after announcing the company’s first big reduction of its work force. “Our model is not for a quick rebound,” he said. “Our model is, things go down, and then they reset. The economy shrinks.”

This has happened before. The dot-com bust earlier in the decade dragged down highfliers like Sun Microsystems and America Online but…

Fuente: newsfactor.com

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