Chris O’Brien of the The Mercury News predicts three Silicon Valley companies that will have major trouble in 2009: Sun, AMD and Palm. Not very shocking, since they haven’t done well in 2008 but nevertheless interesting to see the reasons why. AMD doesn’t have a good product anymore and massive debt. Case closed. Sun focuses on open source, but is not receiving enough revenue. It needs to cut jobs or it will lose large amounts of money. Palm finally is a dinosour of the handheld age. And it is consequently failing to innovate after missing the link with the mobile phone market. Interestingly enough O’Brien thinks Yahoo will make it through a deal with Microsoft. And then will reinvent itself. I do not agree there. Yahoo, although big in Asia and the US, is very vulnerable. It probably will strike a deal with Microsoft, but my guess is this will mean the end of Yahoo as a brand. But then again, I am a recognized bad gambler.
