Measuring "glory days" by total spending is a red herring. I can think of a lot of places where spending is going down, but opportunities are going up, as value is taken away from the big dogs by entrepreneurs. Imagine all of Microsoft Office installations were replaced by software-as-a-service startups at 1/3d the cost. Microsoft would lose $15 billion a year, but a bunch of startups would make $5 billion/yr between them.
Not really.
Whole economy is moving into computers and internet. That means that Information Technology would be in a huge demand.
Still that doesn't mean that being in IT guarantees pay off. It's just that there are plenty of amazing opportunities related to software development.
I think the face of IT is changing in a way that most established companies just can't grasp. Hardware has gotten incredibly cheap, as has software. Current and future generations of workers and managers grew up being comfortable with computers.<p>IT departments don't need to worry anywhere near as much about building and setting up workstations and servers anymore, because it's all easily automated, freeing up the talent pool to focus on more strategic business needs -- security, performance, monitoring, and so on.<p>Plenty of opportunity.