Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
Wrong. Everyone falters at some point. You could probably make a claim that 60% of companies will "falter" this year and be able to point to some debacle, low quarter or misstep to claim you were accurate. Hell, in one of the many fields it's in, Microsoft will falter in 2009--I guarantee it. From the actual article:
In the Channel Insider 2009 Market Pulse Survey, we asked solution providers which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009.
So you're underscoring just how stupid the people that filled out this survey are. Because to say that Sun, AMD or even Novell will be acquired or out of business by December 31st, 2009 is like betting on your favorite American Football team to win the Super Bowl in 2025.
The Channel Insider Prediction at the bottom of these reveals just how unlikely every single one of these predictions comes across as. They predominately disagree with every single reader prediction.
It means that not only are we, the readers, being presented with completely contradictory statements on every page but every single statement is unfounded and backed up by nothing. No market saturation analysis or even talk of operations and profits. Market cap and revenue are good indicators but they don't mean everything.
Others, like CA and Symantec, not so surprising.
"Not so surprising?" Tell me, what has changed so dramatically for 2009 that makes you say that these companies will be acquired or go under?
So tell me, what is a list of reader predictions dealing with the finances and markets of tech companies doing on a 'news for nerds' site?
What other companies are headed for implosion, or should be if all were right with the universe?
Ah, the coup de grÃce for this article ... I'm certain that the Slashdot community will proffer only on the most unbiased and strongly founded suggestions for this objective question.
My work here is dung.
This is the same sort of stuff we hear on Slashdot every day. The actual evaluation at the end of nearly every entry says, "Not very likely".
Though I do think that Sun needs to expand their product strategy or face extinction. Their current high-end market may be lucrative, but it's continually being eaten away at by cheaper and cheaper equipment.
Personally, I think Sun would do well to enter the desktop market. Their Mad Hatter system was a good first try, but they abandoned it before it had a chance to mature! (Speaking as one of Sun's customers who paid money for the software just to be left out in the cold.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
How would you feel if you were the owner or a shareholder of one of companies so prominently set to fail? Self-fulfilling prophecies all around. Given how sensitive to subjective perception these things are, it's by now probably enough for a company's name to be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "bankrupt" for it to really do so.
-- Sig down
Why the fuck is this presented in Flash? It has NO added value and makes the material harder to digest.
My Babylon
The scumbags who make the popups that tell you that your computer's been infected and needs to buy their product or OMG you'll lose all your family photos and pr0n! Such low-life tactics should be amptly rewarded with a swift chapter eleven - or should be, at least in my opinion.
The list is obviously bull. Most of the companies on there could survive in some form for years just on legacy support contracts. Sure, some of them might shrink, have some layoffs or toss out a department or two, but go under? Not on your life.
How can you expect a list based on reader predictions to be accurate? Moreover, how can you expect the list to be taken seriously when the "Insiders" contradict the majority of the reader predictions?
While people can be quite intelligent, allowing the mob to make investment picks based on rumours they read on Blogspot is simply ridiculous. If many analysts couldn't see the collapse of Bear Sterns coming before the last week, I doubt that these readers have the technical skills to predict the collapse of these companies a year in advance.
Web Hosting: Unlimited storage and bandwidth: $5/month
Not funny your comment.. More like insightful and tells the story on one line.
My first impression reading that article (can I say it is an article? I think that flash slideshows are not articles) was that my Engrish tricked me, but no...
Watching CA and Symantec die would be kind of satisfying, if only from a "revenge for all the problems your shitty fucking products have given me over the years" perspective.
Doubt it, though.
Creative Labs.
Have they released a good product in this millenium?
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I predict a growth in marketshare for this site.... They're starting to master the "sensationalistic troll" article, so they should be gaining impressions despite the poor layout and navigation.
I bet you hadn't even heard of them until now.
Exactly... my first thought when reading these was, "Should they really be contradicting their readership and alienating their subscribers?" I mean, I'm all for journalistic integrity, but when's the last time a publication had any?
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
This is the worst post ever. Even according to the article itself the most likely percentage is 25? How does that qualify as "Won't Survive 2009?" Waste of time.
Keep in mind that many (most?) of these are public companies. Channel Insider would probably get a lot of flak if they published an article flatly predicting their failure in the next year. This way, they can point to their own comments and say they did no such thing.
C'mon, folks. You've been watching the news in the last, say, two decades and you're asking "why flash"?
Didn't you notice, the less content one has to present, the more you have to put into the presentation to cover it up.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the early 90's it was Apple. Sun is a perennial favorite now. I never read one of these things saying Hayes or Zeos would get bought or go under. Where's my Hayes DSL adapter?
Zeos merged with Micron and now they are Crucial and MPC. Now guess who's in chapter 11? MPC/Micron is.
What poll foresaw Digital going to Compaq or Compaq going to HP? Magitronic sure seems to have failed. eMachines was bought. Alienware is owned by Dell.
These polls are silly. Some of these companies have more cash reserves than small countries have budgets. There's always a risk of a company large or small failing, but this poll means nothing.
"It's free, but you get what you pay for."
Yes. You get to be free of viruses.
I don't want my AV scanner to scan every file on my machine everytime I use them or write to them. It's a horrible waste of disk performance - and it DOES affect disk performance.
I scan things with ClamAV when I download them and that's about it. Works for me.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
When credit dries up. Only companies which are overly dependent on credit, collapse.
Deleted
Bad day or not, what's the real benefit of running OS X as a guest? Sure, it's good for some people on the desktop, and if that's your use, you probably have a Mac already.
Virtualization is mostly used for servers. What "server" tasks can OS X do that Linux/Solaris/Windows can't do better?
We're mixed. All the desktops are on Microsoft. The servers are on a mix of Linux, BSD, and Microsoft. However, one of the admins has decided that Unix "isn't worth the hassle" (read: it doesn't work with all the proprietary junk he wants to throw into the system) so our installed base of Unix servers has been slowly dwindling.
Anyways, we're on VMWare virtualization products exclusively. Hopefully we can keep it that way. That same admin has been trying to talk up "How much better the Microsoft virtualization products have gotten" lately.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Not to nitpick, but VMWare Fusion runs on the Mac OS host, and as of version 2.0, Fusion now supports Mac OS X Server as a guest operating system. Your VMWare knowledge is about 6 months stale.
I'm beginning to believe there's no such thing as a good antivirus...
The reasons Norton and McAffee don't qualify should be obvious...
AVG was nice until version 8. Then it decided it wanted to start acting like Norton (Slows system, misses a lot)
Antivir might be tolerable (still misses some, but that nag screen is a dealbreaker)
Clamav is close, but others already mentioned the lack of on-access (I'd be prefer on-write) scanning.
How depressing.
Maybe not today, maybe not tommorow, but some times and soon...
Someone will notice that Intel has beccome a full-scale monopoly that does indeed prevent other competitors from entering the market and competing.
With AMD, Intel has a nice biopoly which it can easily and truthfully claim competition(not fair market competition mind you). AMD is all too happy to allow this and even lend a helping hand sometimes.
If AMD goes then someone will pick up the pieces, and if they don't eventually you'll get back to monopoly litigation. Might not happen within the year, but it will eventually happen. That sort of litigation can force Intel to split and worse.
Running OS X as a guest would be perfect for a linux- or windows-based web developer who wants to test out how their client-side code runs on a mac.
Or for a mac software developer who wants to maintain multiple versions and configurations of OS X to test their software against.
Or for windows users who want to try out OS X on their existing expensive hardware, without having to lay waste to their existing installation, or fork out a sizeable chunk of money for more hardware.
...list of tech vendors their readers think will fail, falter, or be sold off in 2009.
Nice of them to include "falter" in their list. In this financial climate it makes it about impossible for their "predictions" to fail.
I'm currently using Avast! exactly because of the problems you mention. I can't stand Antivir due to all the nagging, was using AVG before, but not anymore. Avast! has some annoyances (spinning icon, some nagging notifications) but they can be disabled by editing a configuration file.
You make an excellent point. To carry it a step further, all we know is that a publication claims that their readers think this.
This sort of thing raises interesting ethical questions with respect to stock trading, as well.
What's inside information? Where is the accountability?
Perception is often as important as substance - in some cases, more so.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Well what I was trying to say is that even if the subscribers are morons, that doesn't make the poll completely meaningless. This poll might not give you the slightest hint about the health of the companies it's talking about, but the public perception of these companies might be considered meaningful information.
After all, you could take a poll of morons asking, "who's would make the best president of the US?" and it might not give you any indication of who would make the best president. Depending on the year, however, it might give you a pretty good idea about who will be the next president.
You're running the risk of infecting other people without decent antivirus software y'know. I do know how you feel, on-access stuff does seem to slow down systems a lot.
Sounds like you need a decent snapshot system to save re-installing, mind you by the time you come to use it, all the old software needs updating anyway. I'd stick to *nix boxes.
Still, that site *is* good for testing little files you're slightly suspicious of, rather than being unsure. Hell, I use it sometimes just cos I'm wondering what exactly is in some viruses, and what antivirus packages detect it, and what they think it is. I'm not a sponsor of virustotal.com or anything, I just think it's kinda cool and useful.
I disagree. You're assuming that popular opinion has a lot to do with who gets elected, or what companies survive. That's rarely true.
For instance, who gets elected president isn't up to popular opinion, but the mass media. Yes, the people in general get to pick between the final two, but the ones who actually run are chosen by the media, creating a false dichotomy: "your guy sucks!" "no, your guy sucks more!".
With tech companies, it's a little different, but the fact is still that companies can be deeply unpopular, and still do just fine. For instance, one company on this list was CA (Computer Associates). Who actually LIKES their products? Even the article says their products and service suck, yet they do billions in revenue. Same goes for Symantec, which this article also says has crappy products.
For instance, who gets elected president isn't up to popular opinion, but the mass media.
Talk about false dichotomies-- who gets elected is a result of popular opinion, even if popular opinion is caused by the media's coverage.
Anyway, that was just supposed to be an example of something: when someone answers a question, their answer may be wrong, but it might still have some meaning. It just might not have the meaning that the answerer intended it to have.
Now clearly the people answering these questions aren't giving correct answers, and obviously their opinions don't have a direct causal relationship with the failure of those companies. On the other hand, their answers still might have meaning. For example, you could just treat it as a measurement of public opinion of these companies. If lots of people think you're going to fail, it could perhaps be a sign that people aren't happy with your products, or else maybe that people just haven't heard your name lately. The companies' marketing departments might care about that sort of thing. A bystander might find that interesting.
Beyond that, general opinion of these companies can have an effect on these companies' future success. People are less likely to buy enterprise products of a company when that company's future is in doubt, since people generally want long-term support. Bad perception can cause funding to dry up, stock prices to drop, and business deals to fall through.
Now I wouldn't come close to claiming that being on this list will cause a company to fail. But just because the list doesn't have that particular meaning doesn't mean that it's meaningless.