SNS: Creative Destruction vs. Economic Warfare

SNS Subscriber Edition
Volume 18, Issue 39
Week of October 26, 2015
 
In This Issue

Feature: Creative Destruction Vs. Economic Warfare

• Jobs Lost
• IBM
• Hewlett-Packard
• Dell
• Qualcomm
• Microsoft

Quotes of the Week

Takeout Window

• PCs
• The New Heathrow
• China Military Copies

Upgrades & Numbers

• Nutritional Microanalysis and Meat Patterns: What’s Safe?
• The New Microsoft / China Censorship Program
• Apple Numbers

Ethermail

—

We were just returning from a stunningly exciting FiRe 2015 when two separate emails came in from two Microsoft managers. Both had been let go in the following few days, apparently without notice.

It’s hard to keep track of the number of executives and employees who have been laid off by the West’s top technology firms, but there is no doubt that the numbers are approaching epidemic proportions. Remember Detroit? Well, it’s only marginally ahead of job losses in the top technology companies.

And yet, this huge change is getting almost no sustained notice in the press, other than that of the events as they happen. It’s as though all of the business reporters have ADD, or, perhaps more likely, they think this is normal, just a part of the wonderful-but-painful process of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” as smarter and more competitive companies hire and “losers” fire.

A closer look belies that interpretation, at least as a generalization.