Gartner: Strategies for Recovery

Gartner presented their "Strategies for Recovery" at a Silicon Valley briefing this week.

Color me, jaded. Yeah, I know. I've earned a charter membership to that club.

I've been hosting a pretty good discussion about this session on the subscriber mailing list and I am hoping to land a copy of the presentation(s). Assuming my contact loads my in-basket, I will spend a bit of time giving the slide decks the hairy eyeball to see if any stunning insights were unveiled. Even if I don't land them there's plenty of notables in the article. Have a go!

As for my thoughts, I'm still trying to conjure up the urge to grasp the nettle. A fleeting thought was to publish a critique and litter it with a series of "turning point" titles that have paced the most recent semiconductor cycle. I have yet to decide about doing such a thing but I do plan to ask others for some insight - primarily because there are, no doubt, folks in the trenches that can dissect this and provide some solicitious, cogent and timely observations.

One thing that might be cool is to create an analog to Gartner’s (Dataquest) ground-breaking mid-1990s, recently updated in '05, Hype Cycle Chart:

http://na1.www.gartner.com/resources/130100/130115/gartners_hyp_f2.gif

While I was pondering all this a good friend wrote in and suggested that now is just about the perfect time for titles like these to appear on the scene: "The Light at the end of Tunnel (Sunlight or oncoming Train?)”, and one that is certainly not to be out done “It’s Darkest just before Dawn”. We could add a piece from Gus Richard, who currently hangs his hat at Piper Jaffray. He released the unforgettable “Acapulco Cliff Diving” which, to some extent, would seem to book end neatly with Gartner's amorphous, benignly non-committal title, “Strategies for Recovery”.

It's hard to say where it would fit but my Associate also suggested an all time favorite that came from an October '04 issue of Strategy Alert titled, “Technology, The Maggot Race Begins”. He's right on one count, only a British national could show such mastery of the English language.

Without going into a lot of depth I will say that parts of the "back to basics to stay in business", particularly the part that argues against the use of debt, flash mightily. When you get right down to brass tacks, no debt means there will be no new fabs. Unless, of course, you are Intel, Samsung or TSMC.

Yeah, I could make note of a few other things about this and some stuff (Brooks Instruments purchasing parts of Celerity for one) that are taking place on the business front but......

.....for some reason my head is all messed up. Trust me, there will be another time.

A very quick side note... I sent a message out earlier on this and received a call from a big OEM who, if I recall correctly, stated that Gartner is forecasting a 0.4% CAGR for the semi-industry over the next five years. Ouch!