Another reason this one might be different: tech led the "recession" of 2001-2003, whereas housing and banking are leading this current recession. I don't thin

Another reason this one might be different: tech led the "recession" of 2001-2003, whereas housing and banking are leading this current recession. I don't think that the general economy did technically go into recession in 2001 (partly because a housing-bubble fueled consumer binge delayed the reckoning and probably made it much worse). But high tech went through a brutal correction. For a couple of years, it was crickets chirping out there. So I think that tech took its lumps the way the general economy probably should have. And it worked. We got rid of a lot of crappy products, companies, and (sorry to be so blunt) a lot of crappy people who really had no business in high tech. While those crickets were chirping, a lot of very motivated entrepreneurs put down the groundwork for the next wave of excellent high tech companies. I will agree that things got a bit bubblicious toward the end of 2007 in high tech... but in the end, I just don't think high tech has the same kind of delayed reckoning that banking and real estate are facing. Perhaps 2001-2003 should have been a nuclear winter for those industries as well - then they would have gone through the same soul searching, reckoning, culling, and rebuilding that tech had to do. Yeah, tech will take a hit - there's no way it'll completely avoid the credit crisis. But this time, we're on the peripheries, and we've already taken a lot of our lumps..