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It's no surprise that people cut corners when times are bad. But the economy is supposed to be getting better -- yet according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, more Americans than ever before are focusing on lots of small ways to save money.

According to Harris, 65 percent of us buy generic brands today -- a 3 percent increase from a year ago. Brown-bagging lunches is still on the rise, as are refillable water bottles. The number of people who buy coffee in the morning is still falling, and the number of people cutting back their cable-TV service is still going up.

And today, nearly one person in six has dumped their landline phone service and switched to using only a cell phone.

What's going on here? One explanation is that once the economy really starts to improve, we'll all pile back into Starbucks and re-up our HBO subscriptions.

But another theory -- the one I'm leaning toward -- is that our society has turned an important corner. So many of us were burned by layoffs, credit card debt, fear, and uncertainty that we're not going back to the bad old days. Those "little things" add up to big money, and more of us appreciate that fact.

Ironically, that cultural shift can work to an IT organization's advantage.

Think about your company's hardware refresh cycles. At one time, they might have happened every two or three years. Today, they might run four or five years, maybe longer. And that can be a good thing.

This sort of change resets users' expectations. You kicked them off the hardware upgrade treadmill for a while, and they're learning that the world didn't end. You can approach desktop provisioning as an exercise in price versus performance, instead of turning it into a beauty pageant where your end users are the judges.

The same thing applies to desktop software. Think of cloud-based applications as the industry's generic brands -- many of them do the same thing as the big names, they just do it cheaper and with less fancy packaging. The same is true of open-source applications, whether you're talking about productivity apps like OpenOffice or even an outright move to desktop Linux.

These aren't the best solutions for every business. But right now, you at least have a chance to weigh them objectively, rather than worrying about users complaining that they aren't getting the newest, shiniest, flashiest desktop toys.

Maybe the "bad old days" will come back. For example, it's possible to argue that the smartphone market is built as much upon shallow materialism as any real need for the technology.

But for now, your IT organization has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to adjust your users' attitudes and expectations. Why not use it while you can?