The application backlogs today are as high as they have ever been in companies around the globe. The pressures on cost, on IT, because of the tight economy over the last several years, are absolutely as tight as they’ve ever been. So this twin force of having to try to get more done from an information technology perspective, and yet having, if not less and less resources, certainly less and less growth in resources, it’s dramatic, remarked Steve Balmer, CEO at Microsoft , in his presentation last Monday at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2004.
In Balmers perspective this scenario reflects, in part, last five or six years events ( Y2K and the Internet Bubble). With the Y2K phenomenon, there was a ramp up in IT spending, everybody ramped up their IT spend. And the business people, when it was all said and done, what did they feel like they got for that ramp up? Nothing. Then we hit the Internet bubble, and there was essentially another ramp up of spending. So we’ve been going through almost a drying-out process the last three or four years.
Nowadays, Steve believes we’re back to a stable position. That is, we’ll get back to – instead of a mode of incredible increase followed by a timeframe of decrease in IT budgets – we’ll get back into the pattern that we were in most of the ’90s: good, solid, steady increases in IT spending. IT spending as a percent of the world economy has certainly gone up over the last 20 years. I don’t expect to see that change. But, we’re still all going to have to live in a world where the pressures to do new projects will nonetheless exceed new investments in information technology. And for any company, Microsoft or anybody else, to loose sight of this fundamental fact – it’s the fundamental fact that our customers around the globe are dealing with – would be a mistake. So we have to focus in on productivity, and we have to focus in on total cost of ownership. And I think those twin pillars will largely define what you want, and what you expect of us .
2004-05-27
Em Foco – Pessoa