Hi John, At the supercomm show, Intel almost looked like a completely different company from a product line standpoint - no mention of chips, just telco system boards. When I think of Intel, I think of chips, wifi and wimax.
So Intel's telco product lines are quite different from Intel's core products - many acquisitions in the pot. I'll have to ask a telco friend of mine what he thinks of Intel's efforts so far and whether he thinks Intel will be fruitful on this.
On an unrelated note, there was this company promoting sewer rat robots that install fiber at that particular show - the stuff people come up with is interesting.
Regarding the economy and the stock being stock in a trading range, this downturn sure has been long and hard, and a lot of people (at all the majors) are getting frustrated with their low stock price.
This week there was a lot of activity on the job front - all of a sudden people are doing networking and calling and asking their friends for new hires due to a crop of new opportunities. This of course presents a problem for those companies who recover last (large companies), because people tend to get too frustrated rather than remain patient. It also might create a problem for small businesses that are wavering at the line of profitability (my firm), because when firms in other sectors recover sooner, there's the risk they take your people. Since people have hung through this long, I certainly hope people stay the course for just a bit more and remain patient. There's a huge cost in starting over at another firm, people tend to discount.
This downturn has been so bad for everyone - majors and small firms alike - that you can sense a lot of pent up frustration in the Valley - especially at Yahoo, Intel, certain departments at Microsoft, Cisco, everywhere, etc. Hopefully, people will keep perspective and remember that what they're feeling is a normal feeling for everyone when coming out of a downturn, that it's not specific to them, and will changing companies really fix those feelings that arose from a bad downturn? Some of the experienced people have this perspective, but not many of the folks that have never experienced a downturn before such as this (which is everyone that started working in the 90s).
The folks at Yahoo are easy pluckings because some of their people are fuming at their CEO's compensation package because he only worked there for a couple of years and the first thing he did was get a huge multimillion dollar comp package for himself as he froze wages - not a popular thing to do. Every firm was freezing wages, which is okay given the downturn. But employees there were able to discern the difference between someone that's earned their options over decades vs one year.
Hightech did a much better job handling this downturn than the downturn in the early 90s where you'd read about a lot of job violence due to people being surprised about layoffs. During this downturn, people were given a headsup a year before layoffs started by saying if things don't get better layoffs will start. This gave people a chance to bunker down and cut costs for a year and not be surprised. People understand layoffs have to be done, it's the surprise factor that people have issue with, so this downturn was handled a lot better.
Regards,
Amy J |
