It's been a really tough year for business and information technology. By this time last year, the market had already crashed, unemployment was rising and the future was unknown.

Next year will be better. It's a good thing, too, because everyone in the IT market is pretty tired of pay cuts, layoffs, belt-tightening and delayed upgrades. Everyone certainly is ready to move on from a year of many challenges that forced IT executives to do more with less, and IT talent simply to be grateful for a job that did not disappear.

We report this week on CIO magazine's list of the top 10 technology stories for 2009. It's no surprise that it includes new products and innovations that companies were able to bring to the forefront despite a dismal economy.

That includes Microsoft's Windows 7 to replace the disastrous Vista. Government 2.0 is on the list, too, because the federal government is moving swiftly to make its work more transparent, setting an example that likely will be followed across other sectors.

It includes the great strides made by social networking which basically rewrote Internet communications to take it far beyond email and IM and that now impacts businesses.

Global IT spending is expected to increase by 3.2 percent in 2010, bringing it back to 2008's pre-recession spending level of about $1.5 trillion, according to IDC. Firms are beginning to look for and hire new IT talent, a sure sign that you have a job that has plenty of growth potential. And somewhere in a garage, on a kitchen table or in a makeshift lab is a young entrepreneur working on the next great innovation that will turn your world upside down.