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(By Richard Holway – Monday 23rd Feb 09 5.30pm) Further to the writeup on TechMarketView’s MarketViews report in Monday’s FT- Cutbacks likely to hurt IT services- we got rather a lot of calls from other media asking for similar comment.

One was from Ian Grant at Computer Weekly who, as a result, wrote an article entitled Suppliers that can save firms money will win in 2009 . Most of the comments I made, and Ian reported, have been aired on HotViews many times before. But it comes as a shock to reread them sometimes!

"Holway said he was not predicting the demise of firms like Microsoft or HP or SAP or IBM. But he said it had taken IBM 10 years of pain to turn itself from a seller of products to a supplier of services. "People underestimate the time and pain needed to change," he said.

Holway suggested the best way forward for Microsoft was to buy Facebook and to turn it into the portal for everything Facebook customers used. This is similar to Google's approach with Google Docs, Picasa and other applications.

He said notwithstanding Facebook's recent reversal over ownership of personal data on its site, Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo was wrong. "Why chase yesterday's company when you can get tomorrow's, and probably for less than you'd pay for Yahoo?" he said."