The global economy IS in the toilet. It will remain there for the foreseeable future.

Pricing will continue to decrease, new vendors will come onto the market, and some current vendors will go out of business. Pricing is and will continue to be a VERY important factor for customers.

But there are a bunch of other metrics that are also important to customers, such as scope and quality of content, flexibility to adjust to changing business conditions, and, not least, vendor survivability in a much tougher, more demanding environment.

The underlying dynamics of the free enterprise system haven't changed – the speed and scope of market changes are visibly accelerating because of the conjunction of a major step-change in technological capabilities with the deepest and most widespread recession since the Great Depression.

In such a yeasty fermenting brew customers need to understand the risks of being locked into vendor-proprietary environments. Open source and open standards and commodity services will become increasingly important as gritty competition starts grinding away at vendor margins.

Studies have shown that contextual advertising in business applications doesn't work.

There is also the option of using the Google model and allowing paid sponsorship to appear in the system and allowing the end user to pay less! If a financial system did this by linking into "best deal" suppliers then the system could pay for itself.

One of my 'golden oldie' questions in evaluations is about vendor viability. For that one in the context of open source – see what I say tomorrow on ZDNet.

Also recognize that as many of the vendors are tiny, they can manage their cost profiles far more easily than the majors which have structural issues.

Finally, if you look at the history of computing you can see that many of the world leaders we see today were born out of recession – Microsoft and Apple being the two standout examples. Who's to say it will be any different this time around? If anything, the conditions are forcing emergent vendors to move over to OSS as a way of containing dev costs.

The new crop of vendors are showing that there can be hugely competitive price points for the 80% commodity based services that many businesses need. That price (and therefore cost) differential is too big to ignore.

@ben – disaster? For whom and how? On demand pricing is a central part of the pitch in many cases – don't see anyone going out of business yet?