If you want to know why I think the PC business will be one of the first to recover as this recession starts to end, check out the place where the big airlines park their unused aircraft. Then get someone to show you an inventory of which of those aircraft is ready to fly.

You'll find that they are, increasingly, broken down shells missing important parts. This reminds me of several IT installations I've seen recently.

It's been a good decade since the PC business changed its nature and became the network business. Sometimes I think there's a temptation to overlook the immense changes that happened to the PC when it became a corporate component and to concentrate on the far more visible evolution of the internet.

However, the internet is just a big local area network (Lan) using simpler and more flexible protocols than Novell let loose on the world with Netware. And, increasingly, Lan technology revolves around the internet and its protocols.

There are enough reasons for the slowdown in the IT market, but behind it all is a common factor: nobody will lend money to an internet-based or hi-tech company any more. And here's the first parallel with the airline industry: in the case of big airlines, the recession has allowed them to cut back on repair work - right back to zero.

They're not flying unsafe aircraft, I just think they're flying their spare aircraft. At the recent Farnborough Air Show, it became apparent that people selling repair equipment were starving, waiting for the day when the airlines run out of spares. At some stage, they will.

When the dotcom bubble collapsed and the Y2K panic ended, many big corporations had networks of PCs, servers and IT staff they didn't need. Like the airlines since then, many have been able to get away with pulling equipment out of mothballs to do routine upgrades and assigning staff to do minor development work.

However, this is postponing the day of tackling projects they really need for mission-critical IT functions. So, there really is a limit to how much you can downsize before you cease to function.

The bad news is that this is going to put a big brake on the recovery of the economy. Large corporations are living off their fat but, as with the human metabolism, if you stop feeding the beast it doesn't just absorb fat, it burns necessary muscle.

Today's complex network-based enterprises can't neglect their IT structure with impunity. When they come to start doing necessary investments for their core business, they'll find it involves the IT infrastructure.

This might be good news for the IT industry. However, it's also going to cause hold-ups, because there's no simple way to put a new IT infrastructure in place overnight. Projects take time and require trained staff who understand the problem.

Sadly, the accountants and salespeople who run large corporations seem to find it hard to understand that things take time.

They expect to be able to nip in to PC World and buy a network, priced on the basis of how many feet of cable and how many boxes. In my judgement, that sort of decision is also being taken in many boardrooms now.

As a result, there will be orders for all sorts of hardware and contracts for large systems for companies to do this on behalf of 'bricks and mortar' firms that downsized their IT function beyond the point of anorexia. That's good news for us in the PC business, but bad news for the economy.

What should happen is that confidence will recover. But we're not just going to face one or two Enrons and WorldComs; there will be lots of ordinary everyday businesses that will have to admit that they, too, have been falsifying their profit figures.

Yes, it's widespread and technically, yes, it's fraud. The reason they were doing it is that in the insanity of the dotcom years, no large corporation could manage without finance.

At the time, if they'd published honest figures, nobody would have bought a single share. Fantasy said that electronics companies were all 'growth' stocks, justifying share prices of 50 and 80 times earnings. Against that, ordinary corporations simply had to inflate their own performance figures or do without finance.

As the economy prepares for recovery, the PC business might well feel the effects first. But I don't think that the beginnings of a resurgence can be taken as the sign that the worst is over for others.