Tech companies may be getting hammered by the drop in consumer spending, but now they're only contributing to their own malaise.
GigaOm today blames growing hard times in the tech industry on the massive drop-off in consumer confidence, and lays most of the blame on consumers getting over-leveraged on home equity and credit cards, and the fact that more leverage won't be available. But the vast majority of consumers stop spending for one reason: fear of the future.
And that fear is solidly nailed to job security. If you're pretty darn sure you're going to have a paycheck next year that's as big or bigger than this year's, you don't worry about socking money away in savings or paying down debt. You buy stuff, and figure you can pay the bills when you need to.
If all around you companies are laying off employees and talking about how bad things are, you get the jitters about future paychecks, and you save, and you don't spend, and you worry. If the layoffs and sad talk hit your own company, you get into a hunker-down mentality. It's not about leverage -- it's about security. (If you've been watching the Web, you know that we here now know all about that.)
In that spirit, tech companies carry as much blame as anyone. The layoffs are coming fast as companies either get socked by a down quarter, or use the economy as a legitimate reason to cut staff and expenses to get ahead of news getting worse.
In the last day or so, we've got Motorola cutting 3,000jobs and Electronic Arts cutting 6% of its workforce. Symantec just saidit will cut staff in *anticipation *of lower IT spending. TechCrunch is detailing layoffsat tech companies big and little across the globe. That all comes on top of huge layoffs by Hewlett-Packard as it absorbs EDS -- and of course job cuts in almost every sector of the economy.
You want to know when the economy will turn around? Only when job news stabilizes and enough of the population feels relatively confident that they'll be getting paychecks in a year. How that's going to happen, and when, is anybody's guess.
From Portfolio.com: Tech Observer by Kevin ManeyRelated Links:
