Tech Companies That Won't Survive 2009

buzzardsbay writes "Fresh off their annual market survey, eWEEK channel folks have compiled the list of tech vendors their readers think will fail, falter, or be sold off in 2009. It's important to note that these aren't the opinions of the magazine or its editors. The list comes from folks who work in IT, mostly technology resellers, who are out in the field selling, installing and maintaining this stuff. If there were ever canaries in the tech coal mine, they'd be these service and solution providers who live and die by the slightest shift in the markets. Some of the companies on this list, like Sun and AMD, are shocking because of their size. Others, like CA and Symantec, not so surprising." What other companies are headed for implosion, or should be if all were right with the universe?

Comments

The list

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the list for those who are too lazy to read TFA or allow Flash:

1) Novell
2) NetApp
3) Checkpoint
4) McAfee (let's hope so!)
5) Salesforce.com
6) Juniper, CA, and AMD are tied for sixth place.
7) Sun, no surprise there
8) Citrix
9) Symantec (again, let's hope so!)
10) VMware

Re:The list

[ShadowBlasko]

How quickly people forget that AVG was the same company that spammed the internet for 2 weeks pretending to be IE, and then deleted user32.dll thinking it was a virus after a bad update from their servers.

Nod32 for the win. now.

(And I still have 5 valid licenses for AVG that I PAID for and will not use)

Virtualization

[Thelasko]

Both EMC/VMWare and Sun Microsystems (VirtualBox) are on the list. Does anybody honestly think that Microsoft will rule the virtual machine market? I think it's one or the other.

So much for RTFA

[Paul Carver]

I usually RTFA but in this case there doesn't appear to be an article. There's a bit of an intro but no list of companies that I can see.

Demise *not* predicted ...

[golodh]

Nonsense.

Those who read the article will see that the survey hedges in every way possible and that the above list is _not_ a list of companies that people expect to see disappear. It's a list of companies that people discussed, looked up the turnover of and then wrote noncommittal "analysis" next to.

Please Anonymous, if you're going to try and summarize the article for those too lazy to click on a link, at least make sure you get it right. This is rubbish.

Most of those companies aren't in big trouble

[Animats]

Big companies with real products and a user base can hang on for a long time. Unisys is still around. NCR (National Cash Register), amazingly, is still around, and still selling cash registers (now "Point of Sale Workstations"). Most of the names on the list, like CA, Sun, VMware, and Novell, still have an installed base to service. They can shrink and remain profitable.

I'd look for collapses in advertising-funded companies. We'll probably see some of the social networks go bust. Companies that get most of their revenue from Google ads are at risk. Marchex (the people with "www.90210.com" and hundreds of thousands of similar junk domains) have had their stock drop from 25 to 5. Expect to see free hosting sites, free mail services, and free blog services shut down.

I did a list like this back in the dot-com area, based strictly on cash-flow analysis. That was quite accurate. It's easy to do this analysis for money-losing startups. The definition of "dead" used was "stock dropped 90%". From a stockholder perspective, that's "dead", even if some vestige of the company hangs on. That's was quite common with overfunded startups, by the way. Some of them succeeded, some of them went bust, but many of them become what VCs call "zombies"; they could generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but they couldn't pay back the money invested in them.