Tech Companies That Won't Survive 2009 385
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?
The list (Score:5, Informative)
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
Virtualization (Score:5, Informative)
The list (Score:2, Informative)
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?
So much for RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
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 ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The list (Score:3, Informative)
All of them seem to be leaping over sharks at the moment.
AVG and Avast! are both still usable if you disable all that heavy-handed link scanning.
Re:The list (Score:3, Informative)
I don't agree: it found stuff that Norton and Panda couldn't. On the other hand, it lacks online cheking, so it's great to use as a backup AV only, for full system scans.
Except for NetApp (Score:4, Informative)
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 [sun.com]
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.
Re:Only one choice (Score:2, Informative)
(disclaimer: I do not work for Creative nor have I received compensation from them in any way)
X-Fi Expresscard
Zen Vision:M
These two products alone are wonderful. The former is one of a few Expresscard audio interfaces available, and it sounds awesome. The latter is what the iPod should be - natively supports MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, XviD, virtually every audio format except APE, FLAC, and M4P (but does do M4A).
Their customer service is utter crap, as we can gather from the daniel_k fiasco, and even the $30-$50 "bench fee" for items reqiring service under warranty. However, I will say that they do have some solid products and have a solid lineup of MP3 players that are quite competitive to the iPod.
Joey
Title is wrong (Score:1, Informative)
If you actually read closely, the article discusses companies that could go out of business. So it's a list of major tech companies whose businesses are being buffeted by some force and for whom 2009 is going to be a rough year, one that they might not live through if they're careless. The "insider predictions" are all confident that the companies will live, and even the "reader predictions" predict at best a 20% chance in failure. So one can assume that only one, maybe two, of these companies (at most) will actually go under this year.
Most of those companies aren't in big trouble (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ncr.com] (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 [downside.com] 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.
Re:The list (Score:4, Informative)
For testing individual files; I highly recommend trying Virus Total [virustotal.com]. Upload a single file and they'll test it with a LOAD of different antivirus programs. Worth it for those small files you don't trust.
Re:The list (Score:5, Informative)
Nod32 for the win. now.
(And I still have 5 valid licenses for AVG that I PAID for and will not use)
Re:The list (Score:3, Informative)
I had AVG on my mom's computer, was rather disappointed compared to McAffee enterprise.
Re:Most of those companies aren't in big trouble (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The list (Score:3, Informative)
Have you tried NOD32 from eset? Been using that for a year or two now, doesn't take up a lot of space and is fairly unobtrusive. (Their heuristics aren't the best, and I usually shut that part down).
Re:The list (Score:3, Informative)
What you're missing is that, especially for enterprise software products, popular opinion isn't important, because the users are not the ones making the purchasing decisions. The people making purchasing decisions for that crap are CTOs and other management types, who choose overpriced "solutions" after being wined & dined (and possibly bribed or laid) by the vendor salespeople. Then the low-level employees get to suffer with using the software, but their opinions aren't important.
It's much like politics, where Congresscritters are much more concerned with lobbyists' opinions than with their constituents'.
As for companies like Symantec, they also don't rely on popular opinion that much since they rely on getting themselves forced onto consumers' computers with special OEM contracts.
Symantec (Score:3, Informative)
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.