Wagnerblog

We are undergoing the worst economic crisis in modern history. It is world-wide and will cause severe difficulties for many businesses. On a personal note, I have seen business drop off a cliff as of November 2008.  Our pipeline of projects, usually derived by servicing larger consulting companies, has shrunk to a dribble.

If you are not familiar with the economic problems at hand consider this: For the past ten years or so the worlds financial systems, especially Wall Street, have gone on a drunken bender. And it is now time to get sober. Part of the immediate issue at hand is that banks don’t trust one another and will not lend to one another. That completely freezes up corporate credit which in turn freezes the economy. To make matters worse, everyone up and down the financial food chain lies and presents incorrect, often much too optimistic, information. Here is a link to some famous quotes in the past year or so. http://www.cnbc.com/id/28435645/

At the time of this post we just got the latest 1 month unemployment updates and we lost almost 700,000 jobs last month. Thats more than at any time since the 1940’s (before the US joined the war effort and everybody was put to work building tanks and planes)

What does that mean to a small business consultancy like mine? For starters I am looking into the use of DotNetNuke as a viable open source platform to accomplish projects that we previously may have handled via a commercial product. I am not going to go out of my way to discourage a customer from paying for a CMS – after all you pay for more than licensing – usually you get decent support as part of this fee. However, if a project hinges on cost factors and if I can make plausible case for the use of Open Source it may end up making all the difference.

And in case you want some more financial details… here is a great skit by John Stewart that pretty much sums it up (provided YouTube hasnt nuked the clip. Its seems to remove these awfully quickly)