recess

Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

Over the last few months, there have been countless stories of cutbacks at companies large and small. Real people are losing jobs. For some, that means losing their homes or being forced to change careers. In this series, CNET News is telling the stories of many of the people on the receiving end of the hits recently sustained by the tech industry.

But there is another side to layoffs that doesn't get told very often. That's the story … Read more

As if we didn't know it already, the National Bureau of Economic Research has officially confirmed that the economy is in a recession. So heading into the new year, how will technology fare in what is an increasingly uncertain era? CNET News on Tuesday begins the first of a multipart series on how the recession is affecting the industry and its people. Jim Kerstetter kicks off the series with an overview.

Today's stories:

Gawker Media's rolling layoffs continue

Ford acclerates electric-vehicle plans

Yahoo stock rises on new acquisition report

Ning puts the handcuffs on porno networks… Read more

Editors note: This is the first in a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

Patricia Sueltz has had her share of blunt bosses.

At IBM, Sueltz was CEO Lou Gerstner's technical assistant during Big Blue's dramatic turnaround in the 1990s. After that, she ran the services division at Sun Microsystems for CEO Scott McNealy during the dot-com bust from which many believe Sun has never truly recovered.

But not even the acerbic McNealy could have cooked up what 56-year-old Sueltz saw in front of her two months ago: A PowerPoint slide of … Read more

Shares of Dell and Qualcomm plunged by double digits Monday, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average went into a free-fall of nearly 700 points on news that the economy is officially in a recession.

The Dow closed down 679.95 points, or 7.7 percent, to end the day at 8,149.09, breaking a five-day run at posting gains.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell further, declining 8.95 percent, or 137.50 points, to end at 1,398.07. And the CNET Tech Index dropped 7 percent to 1,014.20.

Despite reports that retailers fared better than expected … Read more

It would be tempting for those in the video game business to take some recent news--for instance, that October sales were through the roof, or that the latest World of Warcraft expansion broke the all-time record for single-day PC game sales--as proof that their industry may be immune from the deep despair confronting the global economy.

And indeed, that seems to be exactly what many people in the industry are choosing to believe: that in rough times, people always spend money on entertainment, and that as entertainment goes, video game software and hardware offer much higher value than other options. … Read more

You know it's going to be really bad when the man who first revealed that the world is flat, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, says it's going to be really bad.

Here's how bad it is: Russians are drinking less vodka.

So, as you gird your loans and tighten your money belts, perhaps it's time to live a simpler life. One that revolves far less around luxurious and complex technologies.

Here are five tech products that you will surely be able to live without in this recession/depression/secession from Alaska.

1. Twitter. … Read more

For a company that's cutting costs these days, the annual holiday party is an easy target. But there have been fewer cancellations in the tech industry than one might think.

True, eliminating an evening of eggnog and sugar cookies won't help an ailing balance sheet that much; in the current financial downturn, it has a lot to do with appearances, too. "It's the economy, definitely, but it's also a lot of public perception," said Celia Chen, a New York-based event planner who runs the blog Notes on a Party.

"People don't want … Read more

OStatic reported on Wednesday that public open-source companies may be vulnerable as they watch their market capitalizations get flushed down the toilet. Unfortunately, it's not just Red Hat, Novell, and Sun that are getting pulverized by Wall Street. The entire market is in free-fall.

Is there a bottom in sight?

Novell and Sun are worth more dead than alive, with more cash on hand than their market capitalizations. It's not quite so bad for Microsoft and some other technology vendors: Adobe, for example, has an $11 billion market capitalization with $4 billion in total equity.

But that doesn'… Read more

2002. That was the year I graduated from law school. It's also the year I left my employer--embedded-Linux vendor Lineo--to join Novell.

For years, I wondered how I had managed to be the only person in Silicon Valley not to make a billion dollars--only to discover in 2002, coming on the heels of the 2001 dot-com bust and ensuing recesson, that finding a paying job was the only thing that mattered. The billions could wait.

A funny thing happened on the way to the medicine cabinet to grab a bucketful of Prozac: Linux began to boom.

I was at Novell when Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone and others began to feel their way toward Linux, first with the Ximian acquisition and then with the Suse acquisition. Novell's fortunes revived, even as Red Hat's stock went on a tear. That recession was very good to open source.

I expect the same will happen this time, both for open source and SaaS, as well as for other software-delivery strategies that lower barriers and prices for enterprises. No, not every open-source company will succeed. Some will be rudely battered by the recession, and I doubt if any will escape it wholly unscathed.

For those who lose their jobs in this mess (over 140,000 in 2008 so far, with more to come), I feel for you. I sincerely do. I have a family member who was out of work for over two years during the last recession. It was one of the most frustrating and heart-rending experiences I've ever witnessed.

But it ended well for him, and this recession will make stronger companies, employees, and entrepreneurs of us all--or can if we'll allow it to do so.… Read more