BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
15 Nov 2008

Alley Insider, who in the best of times could not be mistaken for the bullish and cheerleading CNBC, offers a Week in Review that, while negative and bearish, does not even begin to reflect on the current malaise and impending apocalypse that is sinking in.

“Google slips below $300/share” reads the headline.  If only it ended there.

- Sun Microsystems yesterday announced 5,000 to 6,000 job cuts, with many more to come from the tech industry.  Yahoo! is girding itself for 1,000-1,500 cuts, even though people expect the firm to lay off 3,000 to right the ship.

- Citigroup announced 60,000 cuts between now and 2009, reducing its headcount to a mere 340,000, starting with 10,000 cuts immediately.

- If that is not enough, the state of California is going down.

- People are realizing that something is amiss in online video projections.  Indeed.  This is the problem with too much supply in general, too much UGC in specific, not enough quality content to convince advertisers that online video is worth it.  Even the so-called experts are scratching their heads.

- Which only means one thing, if before the crash you raised $10M on a ludicrous pre-money valuation, expect your VCs to give you call (if they have not done so already) telling you that you are about to be fleeced, see your stake reduced, so that they can make even on the next round… if there is a next round.

- VCs, meanwhile, have their own problems: they now are a net negative in the value creation category.

Since exits won’t happen overnight, the only reasonable assumption is a shrinking of the VC sector, which will mean less money invested, less innovation (if you consider half of the crap VCs funded of late innovation, of course) and less growth…

- On a somewhat related note: we have more faux engineers in the US than real ones (via Paul Kedrosky, via Andrew Lo)… and then we wonder why our bridges are falling apart and our financial world is exploding.  Go figure.

Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning… maybe it is indeed the end of days?

I don’t know… as crazy as it sounds, I am far more bullish and optimistic than I was last year at this time.  Why is that?