The big tech companies are actually selling more, not less than they did in the late 90s.
Oh? Let's test your claim. I've pulled revenue numbers for five of the real biggies in tech-land - CSCO, IBM, INTC, MSFT and ORCL. Guess what, Liz - only MSFT has continued to grow (and impressively so) in spite of the bust. IBM comes in second, but its last twelve months'(June) revenue of $85.2B just barely surpasses its peak year number of $85.1B in 2000. CSCO is running about $19B in trailing revenues, down from a 2001 (July FY) peak of $22.3B. ORCL did $9.5B in it's 2003 fiscal year (May), down from $11.0B in FY2001. And bringing up the rear, mighty Intel did $27.2B the last twelve months. They peaked in 2000 at $33.7B in sales.
And that's just the companies who are still biggies - what about all the one's that were once big, but now don't make the cut? Take LU for example. They were a $20B sales company in 2000 - now they're a mere shadow of their former selves at $8.7B, ttm. Then, of course, there are the pretend former biggies like WCOM, but we'd all like to forget the frauds. There are many more near-biggies, though, that just went away quietly after blowing the hundreds of millions invested in them.
Of course, the survivors will benefit from the disappearance of so many competitors, large and small, but to point to one or two (actually, you made a broad claim, but that was wrong - I found the one or two) that are back to, or ahead of their peak sales and say "we've worked through it now" and expect tech employment to also be back to bubble levels is just plain wrong. |
