I love watching markets, because they are at times very predictable (which doesn’t explain why I lost my shirt investing in alpaca futures back in the 1990’s). Presently we witness market consolidation in various technology sectors. IBM, Oracle and SAP are pillaging every available Business Intelligence (BI) vendor who survived the initial market shake-out. And Mark Hurd, HP’s chief, is predicting an ongoing slew of mergers and acquisitions as part of a broader technology market consolidation. Even my broker thinks the technology market is ripe for thinning the flock (let’s hope his predictions about tech are better than those llama fleece demand). At the risk of repeating myself yet again, all markets consolidate over time. When first invented there were dozen of telephone companies, and eventually there were but a few. When cellular phones were whelped, there were a dozen domestic carriers, and they have merged and purged down to … Continue reading →