The last global economic downturn, in 2001, was pretty brutal for almost all technology-related businesses. The dot-com collapse drove scores of Internet companies into bankruptcy (including mine), and even many of those that survived became dramatically smaller and struggled for years to stay afloat.

The technology industry as a whole also took a huge hit; dot-com companies had been a big market for servers and workstations and corporate software and telecom gear. Established companies that were trying desperately to keep up with the dot-coms in building online businesses were even a bigger market. A corporate tech-spending bubble collapsed along with the dot-com bubble, and the pain lasted almost five years.

Today, as the stock market craters and many prognosticators predict a full-blown recession in the U.S., the impact of a downturn on the tech and internet industries looks to be very different – and probably much less dramatic.

In the internet business, online advertising is expected to continue growing, even though ad spending is usually a major casualty in a recession. The growth rate will undoubtedly slow – declining perhaps from 15 per cent to 20 per cent a year to more like five per cent or 10 per cent – but the fundamentals are nothing like what they were in 2000.

Then there was a sort of land-grab based on future expectations, and short-term results were considered irrelevant. Now, online advertising is being driven by very real changes in consumer behavior and the superior return on investment that it can often provide relative to traditional media.

There has been some lively discussion about whether the efficacy of search advertising in particular makes Google recession-proof, and I don't think it does. But seeing growth slow from the high double digits to the low double digits is the kind of problem most companies would love to have. There will certainly be some suffering from a slowdown in online ad growth, but there won't be carnage.

In the corporate hardware and software business, there are also strong indications that spending cutbacks will be relatively modest. Sobered by the events of 2000 / 2001, corporations are not coming out of a period of heavy investment in tech and telecom gear, as they were last time around. Growth in tech spending has been modest, and the productivity benefits of such investment have never been clearer.

On top of that, overseas markets for PCs and routers and the like, especially in the developing world, are far more robust than they were at the beginning of the decade. For companies like IBM and HP and Cisco, that matters a lot, especially with the fall of the dollar.

The one area that does look very vulnerable is personal electronics – PDAs, smartphones, video games, and digital TVs. There are consumer-driven categories, and this downturn is being led by a pullback in consumer spending (which is in turn a function of the radical correction in the housing market). Corporations, too, may be less willing to, say, provide all their managers with expensive iPhones in a time of belt-tightening. On Wall Street, which represents a major market for devices like the Blackberry, there will be fewer people altogether, and that's bound to crimp sales.

Historically, the boom and bust cycles of the tech industry have generally been powerful enough that the macro-economic situation has not been the defining factor in the industry's health. That looks to be true, still. That doesn't mean there won't be any pain, but with any luck it won't be too excruciating in the tech and internet industries.

---

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

Explore Tech & Web News

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera
• One gadget to rule them all
• The future of social networking: mobile phones