Posted on 01/12/2009 5:20:46 PM PST by nickcarraway
Channel News and Analysis Slideshow: Dire Predictions: Tech Vendors That May Not Survive 2009
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. The results may shock you. Based on their perceptions and predictions, the following are the vendors that made the going list of those that won’t be here in 2010.
ping!
Sun can’t go down! Who will update my OpenOffice?
The great mass of open source programmers?
If Sun goes away who will the Darwin and Linux developers have to copy ideas from?
Some very big names on this list. I have products from 4 of them.
Maybe. I don’t know how much it has been weaned off Sun.
Most of my work today involves expertise in Microsoft systems. But even Microsoft could go belly up. I used to work on Digital Equipment Corp stuff (VAX and PDP systems); no one in their wildest dreams in the early 80s thought they'd be gone by 2000 but it happened.
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
” Crude as they are - the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux’s recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.
Does this matter ? Of course, hugely ! Everyone that wants Free software to succeed on the desktop, needs to care about the true success of OpenOffice.org: it is a key piece here. Leaving the project to a single vendor to resource & carry will never bring us the gorgeous office suite that we need.
What can be done ? I would argue that in order to kick-start the project, there is broadly a two step remedy:
* Kill the ossified, paralysed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat. This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers. Once they are attracted and active, listen to them without patronizing.
* Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to ‘share’ all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.”
Novell has half of its market cap in cash assets. It has enough cash to fight off a takeover attempt. Novell had $1.4 billion in cash assets before the big crash.
In addition, it owns UNIX (remember the SCO lawsuit?). That means that they own something that Sun, IBM, Oracle, and even Microsoft needs, either in part (code) or whole.
If one of the above were to take over Novell, the others would jump into a massive bidding war. None of the companies that would normally buy Novell have cash for a non-contested sale, let along a contested sale.
The “IBM buying Novell” rumor has been around for over a decade. Microsoft’s marketing machine has put Novell into bankruptcy for a decade too. Now Novell is in partnership with M$, run by former IBM execs. Go figure.
I’d personally vote for some of the middle vendors — ie, CDW and Ingram Micro.
IT spending in government and health care look like they’re running crazy. I’m doing a gov’t job, and my managers just announced about 65 openings. It seems that the state gov’t that we manage is gaining net users as well as total servers every day, in spite of claiming that it’s downsizing.
What has about died is traditional break-fix services, which will be tough on shops that are too small to hire their own IT person — none will be left in business. However, cloud storage and hosted email/calendaring is in their future.
Microsoft will continue to do its thing, but they still have a basic problem — there is no compelling reason to upgrade most of its products. Office 97 was good enough for most environments, and everything after that yields little ROI. Active Directory 2003 was deemed “good enough” as it replaced the superior eDir, so why would a superior AD 2007 replace the entrenched AD 2003? Its new email offerings will face competition from hosted solutions, which make tons of sense at $1 per user per month in bulk. And, SharePoint makes no sense to me, as virtually everything that SP does for users can functionally be done w/ Exchange, GroupWise, Notes or any number of open source (free) alternatives. And, as the Vista marketers found out, XP does pretty much everything one needs or wants to do with an operating system.
Sun bought out it’s Unix license many years ago.
Shouldn’t Apple be on that list? Especially if Steve Jobs departs in 2009.
They do a survey of "solution providers" who are supposedly worth listening to and then Channel Insider poo poos all the choices as "unlikely" to be sold or going out of business.
Well....which is it? I hate these prognostication articles that abound when the markets take a downturn. They are a load of bull shiite.
I do believe that that was the suckiest slideshow ever.
“I do believe that that was the suckiest slideshow ever.”
IT did expand a 3-minute read into a 10-minute boring show, didn’t it?
Only if you're one of FR's perennial anti-Apple Trolls.
Steve Jobs is not likely to depart in 2009. And if he did, Apple will continue. They have a ton of bright people there, and while Steve surely brought them back from the brink a decade ago and turned things around, he's not the only idea-man in the company. He's clearly tired of the cult of personality theme, and wants it to be over. Done right, he'll escape that without hurting Apple's luster.
Only one thing could have made it worse: a stupid Flash advertisement between company #2 and company #1, so you'd have to watch it before finding out #1.
And believe me, it's been done. IMO, it's grounds for murder.
Lets see...
Apache -> Open Source
Blowfish -> Open Source
Sun has gotten as much from OpenSource as it has given
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