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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?
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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
We'll just release 2010 ahead of schedule.
Have gnu, will travel.
So THIS is where I find out I'm being downsized?
More music, fewer hits
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Why the fuck is this presented in Flash? It has NO added value and makes the material harder to digest.
My Babylon
10. VMWare
9. Symantec
8. Citrix
7. Sun
6. AMD
6. CA
5. Salesforce.com
4. McAfee
3. Checkpoint
2. NetApp
1. Novell
Why is this in Flash? Why did that page need javascript?
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.
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.
Pats.
"Pats?" I haven't heard of them ... are they like a team of sexually indeterminable players?
My work here is dung.
Sites that code cluelessly and need javascript and flash to display a simple list will die first (hopefully, I am not so sure). Topping the list is http://www.channelinsider.com/
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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
SCO!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
would they take ati with them, or would ati be sold off. And if AMD went under what would that mean for intel in terms of monopoly rules, and to nvidia if ati went with them
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.
Why make a list of companies that will "go out of business", then hedge by saying they might be bought up, then finish with, well we don't think much of this is likely.
Reminds me of a skit I saw once.
Interviewer: You have an facinating new book called, "Was Hitler Welsh?" Well was he?
Author: After exhaustive study, I can confidently say, no he wasn't.
OK, here goes:
10)HP :D
9)eBay
8)Nintendo
7)Adobe
6)Red Hat
5)Amazom.com
4)IBM
3)Microsoft
2)Apple
1)Google
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.
Why would anyone want to include Mac OS X as a guest? Apple goes out of their way to make it not run on things that aren't Macs. Why would someone then adopt it as a virtualized guest?
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
I recently spoke to a director of sales.
His sales pipeline is double the one he had last year, because customers have decided to stop fooling around with start ups that will probably be out of business next year, and go with known brand names.
I'm not giving any more details because I'm not very familiar with insider trading laws, and don't want to get in trouble. But anyone who thinks that larger companies that sell into the IT marketspace are in trouble, clearly have no clue about what's really going on.
The NetApp vs Sun lawsuit over ZFS isn't going the way NetApp would like it to ...
http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/index.jsp
To the contrary, NetApp may end up like SCO vs Novell, where the initial complainant ends up owing the respondent. Sun could very well end up both pwning AND owning NetApp.
As for the antivirus companies - I wish, but there will always be *some* "useful fools" around, and people whose financial self-interest aligns with enabling them to stay dumb and foolish.
Kevin Smith on Prince
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.
Or are they counting it as already gone (since it seems to be a zombie now...)?
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.
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.
Several of the names on that list crop up every time the doomsters gather for another round. In any case, there's nothing wrong with being "sold off". Sometimes that's the making of a company which now has access to capital and markets it would never have had on its own. The only thing one can say for certain is that no one know what's going to happen, and one can say with some degree of likelihood that if some big names do falter in the next two or three years then among them will be some names that have never been on a a Doomsday list because everyone thought were fine. There'll be a lot of execs out there sitting on some awkward secrets (read: big holes appearing in the balance sheet and the banks unwilling to refinance) or some awkward legal claims (read: massive damages for corporate IT scams the victims have so far kept secret for fear of affecting their sales and stock price).
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
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?
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.
Anything you can do, Mac can do better. Mac can do anything better than you.
What
What is
What is with
What is with the
What is with the infinite
What is with the infinite refresh?
???
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
It can "look and feel" better....
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.
No it can't.
Yes it can!
and the headline is completely wrong - the article lists ONE company that MIGHT go out of business or be acquired and also speculates that Novell MIGHT be acquired (by whom? Who knows?)
Total garbage. Don't waste your time.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
bias: I use to work for Symantec 3 years ago.
I always love this one. I was at Symantec for almost 7 years. I never even saw Norton products. Yes they use to be crap (have gotten aLOT better recently but I still don't run them) but Symantec has a huge stake in the Enterprise networks. I guess most people who bother to respond think their network of 500 users is big. This past year as a consultant working with Symantec products the average network I was in was 70,000+ seats.
John Thompson was smart. 9 years ago he realized the consumer AV space was going to get crowded. The merger with Veritas took longer than was hoped for but now things are going gang busters and most of the Symantec partners have more work than they now what to do with. Sym has dozens of key pieces of software all over the security spectrum. You may not like Norton but don't count them out.