There were three big pieces of news mentioning EMC this week:
- 1)EMC's sales slumped 9.2 percent from the year-ago quarter to $3.15 billion, $100 million below the Thomson Reuters consensus forecast
- 2)EMC said it's looking to cut most employees' pay by 5 %
- 3) Joe Tucci said Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL)'s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems (NSDQ:JAVA) will be a game-changer
Which of these statements are causal in nature? If you vote 1&2, then I'd reckon to guess you are right. If so, what's up with the headline below?
Talk about misleading the reader!
I appreciate your comments related to the affairs of EMC since it directly affects Documentum’s status in relation to the rest of the CMS space that faces unique economic challenges right now. In addition, in the sea of other popular CMS blogs out there, your original take on the CMS world always pique my curiosity. That said, I think I could not agree more with Joe’s tactical decision of executing and navigating through the current financial environment. I can reckon with his assessment about vertical and horizontal stacks as well. EMC’s past and present acquisitions are relatively consistent about strengthening its horizontal stacks. Likewise, Documentum’s strength lies with horizontal initiatives even though it was not mentioned in Joe’s quarterly conference. I also agree with his opinion that the strength of the horizontal stack will eventually win out over the vertical stack since nobody corners the IT market these days. That is why, maybe, EMC did not play its hand on Oracle’s recent acquisition of Sun. In any case, he may be seeing something we do not see because he suspended the scheduled layoffs for now. He is instituting a temporary 5% pay cuts instead, perhaps choosing to preserve his experienced workforce for potential increased demand. Maybe we are seeing the early signs of approaching the bottom of this difficult economic cycle. With that hope in mind, perhaps we can observe the good lesson we have learned from the economic downturn: Our economic difficulties stemmed, at least in part, from misguided policies that attempted to make the unfortunate become fortunate unnaturally. Regrettably, when we attempt to force good fortune, we only end up making everyone unfortunate. The strength of this country has historically been that we have created an environment in which opportunity abounds, but individual initiative is what makes the difference between who succeeds and who does not.
Posted by: shiningarts | 04/28/2009 at 09:55 PM