So how's the recession going for you? We now appear to be in the very eye of the economic storm - but in the technology world there are a few winners as well as losers.
It's been a week of results from the tech giants - Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Apple are among those who've given us updates about their finances. So what have we learned?
Mournful Microsoft
The biggest noise in software has suffered its first fall in sales since it floated as a public company in 1986.
A quick scan of the results shows revenue falling in most divisions - but it's the core Windows business which has suffered the biggest fall, with revenue down from $4bn to $3.4bn. So Vista has very quickly stopped being the money-spinner that was promised - no wonder Microsoft is keen to create a buzz around Windows 7.
Last October, when I interviewed the chief executive Steve Ballmer in London, he was already gloomy about the prospects for technology spending. Now those fears have been realised - and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell seemed almost to revel in the gloom: "We remain more cautious than most," he said. "While we'd all like to hope that the recovery will be short and painless, we unfortunately think it will be slow and difficult."
Upbeat Amazon
By contrast, the online retailer seems incapable of putting a foot wrong right now, except for the odd row over a "cataloging error".
Consumers may have taken fright on the high street - though rather less than some retailers have claimed - but they're still spending freely online, or at least at Amazon. Sales for the quarter rose by 18% compared to a year ago.
The big rise was not in Amazon's old core business - books, music, DVDs - where sales were only up 7%, but in sales of what is classified as "electronics and other general merchandise", which were up 38%.
In other words, Jeff Bezos' mission to become the world's online shopkeeper seems to be proceeding according to plan. The company has also being making much of its electronic book Kindle 2 and its cloud computing initiative - but it's the millions of shoppers buying everything from lawn-mowers to leisurewear who are providing the profits.
Yahoo Still Struggling
But if online retailing seems to be weathering the recession quite well, the online advertising market appears to have stalled. Yahoo's earnings press release was headlined "Company Exceeds Midpoint of Operating Cash Flow Outlook Range" - a classic case of burying some pretty poor news under a piece of gobbledegook.
Further down, you find that search advertising revenue was down 3% and display advertising down 13%. Now, it was only a couple of months ago that internet advertising types were telling me that their industry was going to keep on growing through the recession, as companies sought the better value that the web could offer. While Yahoo has its own particular problems, it's not the only firm finding that those rosy predictions are not being borne out.
Oh, and another embarrassment for Yahoo today withthe closure of Geocities, the free homepage service it paid more than $4bn for at the height of the dot com boom.
Apple Advances
It was Apple which produced the week's most sparkling results, with sales of iPhones and iPods both beating expectations. Even a fall in Mac sales - down 3% - didn't depress the Wall Street analysts, who rushed to upgrade Apple shares. In a home computer market forecast to fall 11.9% in 2009 - its worst ever decline - it looks as though Apple may increase its market share.
I keep expecting the high price of its products to deter cash-strapped consumers - especially now that you can get a netbook for about a third the price of Apple's cheapest laptop. But so far, that hasn't happened.
And with Steve Jobs' stand-in Tim Cook describing netbooks this week as having "cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, and very small screens", it seems that the company is determined to stick to its premium pricing policy.
So the recession is hitting corporate technology spending and online advertising hard. But a few companies are showing that hard times are the best time to steal a march on your rivals.
In search of audio perfection
Does anyone care about good audio quality anymore? In the age of the MP3 player have we all settled for lower quality audio, compressed sounds, and the artificial edge to ripped music?
When I first started ripping my CDs on to my computer I did so at the default 128kbps quality setting. It wasn't long before I realised that while the music sounded acceptable on my MP3 player, songs sounded pretty "thin" when played through my stereo.
If you are still ripping in MP3 128kbps quality, try playing a song through your hi-fi and then use the original CD. There's a world of difference.
When iTunes first started it was offering songs at 128kbps in AAC format, which many people believe to offer better audio quality than MP3.
Again, it sounded okay on the bundled headphones that came with your iPod but play it through a stereo and the limitations are clear.
These days Apple offers all of its songs in 256kbps AAC format, twice the quality of songs when it launched.
But it is still a "lossy" format. You are not getting the full quality of the CD.
The issue for many of us is that the distinction between our music on the go and the music we listen to at home is blurring. Many of us now have all of our music stored on a computer or server, which is streamed to a hi-fi or speakers.
I've put all of my CDs in storage and have about 7,000 tracks on a server up in the attic which I access via iTunes or a games console.
The problem is that I have some songs recorded at 128Kbps MP3, most at 192Kbps MP3 and many at 192Kbps AAC.
I'm slowly beginning to rip my CDs once more - this time in a lossless format. There are quite a few to choose from, among them Apple Lossless, Free Lossless Audio Codec, Audio Lossless Coding and Windows Media Lossless.
The downside is that the better the bit rate of the encoding, the more storage space is requured for the track and in the case of lossless formats.
As I want to play these songs on the go I have to choose Apple Lossless, because my iPhone supports this format.
For those of us pursuing the lossless route the problem is the quality of the headphones that come bundled with our MP3 players, which tend to have very limited frequency response and so can't take full advantage of the extra audio quality.
There is a good range of more expensive earphones out there from companies such as Bose, Shure and Etymotic. All which significantly improve the listening experience.
The US firm Etymotic has done a deal with small British firm ACS to take this one stage further - providing custom sleeves that fit your ears alone.
I've had the procedure done myself, which you can watch in the video below. It's a painless process, pretty quick and quite interesting, if you've ever wanted to know what the inside of your ears look like.
A pair of Etymotic HF2 earphones bought from Apple comes with a voucher. You can use that to get a "cast" of your ears at an approved audiologist.
You will then be sent a pair of custom sleeves which fit on to the end of the HF2 earphones. ACS also makes a range of custom sleeves which fit on to other manufacturers' earphones.
So why do this? The HF2 earphones certainly offer much more sophisticated audio quality than the earphones that come bundled free with MP3 players. And the custom sleeves offer a better fit for your ear and noise isolation. The advantage here is that you don't need to turn up your music to hear it better because it is not being diluted by external sound.
Custom sleeves on a decent set of earphones is a couple of stages removed from true earphone nirvana, however. If you are one of the jet set then you could invest in a pair ofcustom monitors. These are sleeves with the audio drivers built-in and used by rock musicians and Formula One drivers. However, they can cost up to £500, so are not exactly within reach of the mainstream consumer.
I was chatting to Michael Shaver from Etymotic on Wednesday and he said teenagers had become used to cranking up the bass and volume on their MP3 players to compensate for the external noise of the street and the limitations of their earphones.
Aside from being bad for your hearing, this is clearly not the best way to get the most out of your digital audio.
The wider problem, however, is that a whole generation of music lovers have become accustomed to the poorer audio quality of MP3 encoded at a low bit rate.
Professor Jonathan Berger, from Stanford University, has been testing the listening preferences of students, exposing them to MP3 encoded music and tracks encoded at a higher quality.
He has been doing this for a number of years and found with each new influx of students, more and more them prefer music encoded at the lower MP3 encoding rate.
His explanation: music listeners have become accustomed to the digitised "sizzle" of MP3 compression.
So if you are of the generation that has been brought up with the iPod, you might want to save yourself some disk space and the extra money required to buy better earphones, or custom sleeves, and stick with the bog standard MP3 encoding.
A Budget for broadband?
Earlier this week I wrote that we were still no clearer about who would pay to bring superfast broadband to every corner of the UK. But after today's Budget we are perhaps a little more clear about the way the government plans to get bog-standard broadband to places that don't have it now.
The chancellor put his weight behind the proposals in Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report for a Universal Service Obligation for broadband. He even suggested a speed and who would pay for it. The answers? 2Mbps (not "up to" I note) and you, the BBC licence fee payer. But relax, he's worked out that there's enough money swilling around in the pot set aside to help with digital switchover.
£803m was ring-fenced from the licence fee to help people who might struggle to afford new equipment as they were obliged to switch to digital television. The National Audit Office recently calculated that as much as £250m of that might not be spent. All sorts of people were looking at that money and licking their lips, but it looks as though it will now be transformed into the Broadband Switchover Fund.
But there are still a few questions to be answered. The chancellor said in his speech that the aim was to reach "virtually" everyone by 2012. Right now, depending on whose figures you believe, just 1% of the country - or around 250,000 homes - cannot get broadband access. So who will still be left out after 2012?
Then there is that 2Mbps - will that be enough to count as broadband by 2012 when around half the country will have access to 40Mbps or more?
And finally - is £250m really enough? I suppose that depends on what kind of technology is employed. A friend who knows about these things told me the other day that covering the country with Wimax masts - which should supply 2Mbps - would only cost £750m, and you'd think there would be enough of a commercial market in Wimax to cover the shortfall.
In any case, the government says that any extra cost could be met through "additional funding mechanisms", whatever they may be.
In short, it does look as though we've taken a significant step towards universal broadband coverage. Now all we need to do is sort out who will pay for the next generation network the government says is even more vital for our economic future.
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