Businessspeak of the week: "Shrinking IT budgets"

Shrinking? Since when?

I see these words creeping subtly into marketing documents and news releases without any justification. It seems that everyone and their cat is willing to charge me thousands of dollars for IT spending trend surveys, but here's a quote from one of their synopses:

...we suspect that IT executives in end-user organizations prefer the more measured growth in IT spending that today's economic conditions allow. -- computereconomics.com

Ooh. "More measured growth." I don't think that counts as shrinking.