A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my pessimism regarding the technology sector. The market had seemed to interpret the surprisingly good results reported by Big Blue (IBM), Google (GOOG), and even Yahoo! (YHOO) as reasons for unleashing optimism and a bargain hunting shopping spree for stocks of publicly traded technology companies. Maybe the recessionary environment and the woes faced by banks and the American consumer would not negatively impact corporate budgets for technology. My skepticism rests on the ability of secondary technology companies to weather the economic slowdown. In …

 
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) puts on his best poker face with this letter to the Yahoo! (YHOO) board of directors. Ballmer isn’t known all over the world as an innovator, but as a former lawyer and one of the architects of Microsoft’s monopolistic business tactics, I’m sure he can hold his own at the negotiation table. Of course, that hasn’t been the case lately with the outlandish premiums he paid for aQuantive and Facebook. So maybe he’ll back off of this hard stance:
Dear Members of the Board:
It has …

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has a very informative piece on the credit crisis and its effect on startups. Apparently, many startups are putting their venture cash in Auction Rate Securities, financial instruments that are normally very liquid and provide better yields than typical bank savings/checkings accounts. Unfortunately, the perfect storm of the current credit crisis has put a freeze on the ARS market and startups are finding a difficult time to access their cash.
What really surprised me from the article was that many startups were putting their cash in …