When your clearest view is the one in your rear-view mirror, you can be perfectly correct about where you've been while being wildly wrong about what's ahead. That was the image that came to my mind when I read an interview with a major IT vendor concerning the inevitability of IT spending upturn:

[A] lot of companies delayed upgrading their software and hardware because of the financial collapse last September, [but] “Things tend to break after a while”…

Many companies extended their maintenance contracts, but, at some point, that won’t be enough and IT systems will start failing on a large scale.

Predicting IT failure is not a hard thing to do. When you deal with tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of servers, data storage systems, network equipment, etc, it’s a relatively simple statistical exercise.

“There’s a big crunch coming”…Companies will start to experience ever greater IT failures unless they start buying new hardware.

So right, and yet so wrong.

Yes, things will start to break; yes, maintenance costs will start to rise; yes, struggling along with what one has, just a little bit longer, will start to seem increasingly infeasible.

But "start buying new hardware"? How '90s. If people think that's their only option, or even their most obvious option, then People Who Understand The Cloud will have allowed a once-in-a-career-span opportunity to sneak by.