With 2007 all but put to bed, a lot of people are looking forward to 2008 with not a little trepidation. And the cause of that fear is the prospect of a decline in the macro economy.

I'n no economist and have healthy scepticism for many self-proclaimed experts, but there is a lot of consistency in terms of the impact on IT buying. Down markets can be very healthy for technology buyers and very disuptive on the incumbents. In the early 1990s, for example, companies like Microsoft, Dell and Oracle were able to win chunks of market share as firms looked to take advantage of the move to client/server architectures, and shift away from mainframes.

In the wake of the dot-com collapse, software-as-a-service companies such as Salesforce.com took advantage of the squeeze on capex spending by offering subscription-based pricing that let firms get projects up and running very quickly.

In ECM, it's pretty obvious that firms offering low-cost, fast-deployment options stand to prosper if the economy struggles. That could be good news for SharePoint, Alfresco and companies offering freebie tools such as IBM Yahoo OmniFind and Microsoft's Search Server.