Bye bye Symantec!
Bye bye Symantec! people have realised how shoddy your software is compared to others
The MercuryNews.com 2008 Silicon Valley 150 rankings show Data Domain making the biggest annual percentage sales gain out of all the IT companies in the list at 122 per cent to $274.1m. Symantec made the biggest loss of all at -$6.6bn. The SV150 rankings compare companies on their 2008 versus 2007 performance. Looking just at …
A classic case of using numbers without understanding what they mean.
HP "employment" didn't rise (it didn't hire lots of new people) -- it bought EDS, which means it just has more people now. No new employment created, and actually quite a lot of folks lost their jobs as a result.
Symantec didn't "lose" $6Bn -- it is in fact a cash machine, generating more than $1.2Bn in cash every quarter. The loss is entirely on paper, an effect of how the beancounters deal with goodwill (the difference between book value of an acquisition and what you actually pay for it).
Nevertheless, it does indicate that Symantec has overpaid for its acquisitions. Clearly, it did not wring out the anticipated value inherent in the price paid. Otherwise there would be no goodwill to write off. But, surely not as good a bullet point for a story in the Merc.
Paris, because she understands the importance of real money.