I think the next little while is going to be a really tough interval for business, and a lot of changes no one is thinking about will be rolling down the pike. Consider that Sequoia presentation I linked to earlier - just how many "eyeballs are all that matter" Web 2.0 plays do you think will survive the next year? I'm guessing that a lot of them will go down, because they have no revenue model, and loans simply will not be forthcoming.

Things could get worse than that though - consider Google. Their entire business is built on top of advertising. I've wondered about the stability of that model for a long time, but in a massively down market where consumer spending goes into hibernation, I think all bets will be off. It would not surprise me a bit if Google ended up being a lot smaller than it is now, and if Microsoft - which has actual products - ends up being in better shape at the end of all this.

The bigger question to me is this: which companies will deal with reality fast enough to survive? There's a lot of pride holding up money losing ventures in a lot of companies. When credit is easy to come by, that's an expensive mistake, but a survivable one. When credit dries up?

I think we could be looking at an episode of "The Quick and the Dead" in the tech sector (elsewhere as well, but dreamy business plans seem to be more common in tech).