Michael Sainsbury | July 15, 2008
AS Bette Davis's character Margo Channing so memorably said in the 1950 film All About Eve: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
For the technology and telecommunications sector it's going to be a very long, very bumpy night as the economic slowdown - which has already hit the consumer's hip pocket - starts to bite into company budgets.
The present malaise started 12 months ago when the credit crunch - precipitated by an unprecedented personal corporate debt binge, especially in the US housing sector - led to a freeze on corporate lending and the end of the boom.
A year on, the crisis has inexorably soaked into global financial markets, and infected consumer sentiment across the developed world. The effect will take, at the very least, another year to wash through the worldwide economy. Some analysts say there will be a global recession, and possibly a very bad one.
Locally, mainly due to the mining boom, Australia has already been dealt high interest rates, which the rest of the developed world is now starting to experience. The last Australian interest rate rise in March was the straw that broke the consumers' back and bank.
Since then, retail spending has pretty much fallen off a cliff. Of course, discretionary items go first, which is why folks in the telecoms and computing sectors must be very, very nervous.
The telecoms sector has not faced a full economic downturn in this country since the early 1990s. Back then, mobile phones were the size of bricks, and the internet - well there was no internet. Back then telecoms were pretty much recession and depression proof. The basic phone line was an essential, if vanilla, service.
A decade and half on, nearly everybody has at least one mobile device and more than 50 per cent of homes and businesses have high-speed internet.
These days, growth is all about getting customers to keep changing phones and upgrading to more expensive broadband services and phone plans.
Yet industry retailers are saying growth has dropped off since April.
At the corporate level, earnings are expected to be hit - in some sectors quite hard - over the next 12 months.
As the world's largest maker of equipment that runs the internet, Cisco Systems - which sits right at the apex of the IT-telecoms and media sector convergence that is now, finally, upon us - is probably the bellwether.
There is cold comfort then, in comments from Cisco chief John Chambers last week that the company's customers don't see the economy - and that is just in the US - getting better until next year. Even that timetable is probably optimistic.
Market analysts quickly joined the fray, commenting that Cisco's customers in the US and Europe had cut spending.
Australia's annual reporting season is due to start in just 10 days and will contain some poor results, yet many of those will be due to post-March issues and the outlook across the board and outside the resources sector will be bleak.
The local banking sector has embarked on a round of consolidation and is at long last addressing the extremely thorny issue of replacing core banking systems.
While those projects' headlines of many billions of dollars look good and should cheer a handful of software makers and the much lower margin systems integrators, the upgrades are not super-urgent and still only in their very early stages.
The financial sector is hurting badly right now and like many others at the big end of town, when the revenue line looks shaky, capital spending gets reined in.
Small businesses, the oft-forgotten engine rooms of the Australian economy, are even quicker to stop spending and are generally better than their big brothers at making do with what they have.
Which business out there right now, for example, would sign off on a computer, mobile phone or printer upgrade unless it was urgent?
Rough night? You betcha.