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Get out your valium.
Bloomberg: U.S. Stocks Drop, S&P 500 Sinks Most Since 2001 Terror Attacks
The Dow Jones Industrial Index, simultaneously economic barometer, canary in the coal mine, and metaphor for America’s hopes and dreams, has dropped 500 points in the worst slide since the September 11th attacks.
Was it the Lehman bankruptcy, (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history,) that did it? Or the forced sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America? Or was it the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Or AIG needing a federal bailout?
No. It was me.
I removed the tag from my mattress that says “Do not remove,” and, well, it was the straw that broke the back of the American economy, apparently. Sorry about that.
More seriously, I’m sure that among those who still held Lehman Brothers stock Tuesday morning, those who managed to sell first ended up (relatively) happier than those who came after them. It just reinforces the idea that in today’s market, you need to take every step to monitor your network and be proactive about problems. (Because when the market is in a panic, you need to be making bad decisions faster and more reliably than anyone else out there.)
PCWorld: HP Announces 24,600 Layoffs in Wake of EDS Acquisition
When it rains, it pours.
Hewlett-Packard will lay off about 24,600 employees over the next three years in an effort to streamline the company following its US$13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last month, the company announced Monday.
The layoffs will be part of a three-year restructuring program, HP said in a statement. The company will lay off about 7.5 percent of its workers during that time, with nearly half of the reductions coming from HP's U.S. workforce, HP said.
Can things get any worse?
Cnet: Forrester slices 2009 IT spending projection
That was supposed to be a rhetorical question!
IT spending is expected to rise 5.4 percent this year, revised from previous Forrester projections of a 2.8 percent increase.
But next year, growth in IT spending is expected to get whacked down to 6.1 percent from previous projections of a 10 percent increase.
Forrester, which revises its annual projections on a quarterly basis to reflect changes in the economy, attributed the changes to its most recent projections based on the drama that is sweeping across the economy and world markets.
"We think the economy will turn (for the worse) in the third quarter, and if that happens, we'll see a significant slowdown in IT spending in the fourth quarter and then the first and second quarters," said Andrew Bartels, a research analyst with Forrester Research.
It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists. Does anyone out there have a blade?
Network World: Cisco to enter blade server market?
In a bulletin issued this week as a preview to Cisco’s Sept. 16 analyst conference, investment firm UBS states that Cisco is likely to enter the blade server market within a year. The firm cites “industry checks” as its source but did not say whether the company’s entry would be through acquisition or organic development….
…Cisco last year announced a $150 million stake in server virtualization software vendor VMware; unveiled an appliance to control pooled data center compute resources; and this year rolled out switches with increasing application intelligence and unified transport fabrics to gain more control over the source, destination and flow of data center traffic.
Blade servers are the next most obvious piece when it come to filling out this strategy, observers such as UBS note.
So, I guess it’s not all bad news for today.
