Recession or another Tech Bubble?

Bust, I mean. There’s been a hot debate if the economic problems plaguing the United States are first signs of a recession or just a slow down. It’s not just the weakening dollar or the rising prices of crude oil. Even tech companies at NASDAQ aren’t immune. Will 2008 be the year the bubble burst?

Here are some early signs:

• Yahoo! has been rumored to lay off hundreds of employees in order to increase profitability, prop up its deflated stock price and narrow the focus of its sprawling Internet portal to a smaller number of crucial areas, according to the New York Times.
• Motorola had a 33% decrease at the end of 2007 compared to 2006, and the segment incurred an operating loss of $1.2 billion. They axed their CEO Ed Zander late November last year.
• Apple’s stocks turned sour after reporting the holiday quarter earnings. Analysts say they didn’t sell as much iPods in the US compared to the same quarter the year before. International sales helped the numbers up to a plateau. They must have overshot the hype. The big question — can the iTouch revive iPod sales?
• There’s the eBay Shuffle too. Long-time eBay CEO Meg Whitman will be replaced by John Donahoe. The Skype purchase didn’t pan out well.
• The big shocker of all is Silicon Valley Superstar Google showing a drop of over 160 points since January 1 this year. That’s from a 52-week high of $747.24 to a low of $561.20 this month alone. John Battelle wonders how this huge drop could affect the Google culture. John Chow speculates part of the trouble happened when Google shrinked their ad clickable areas. Huge publishers like Markus Frind (Plenty of Fish) saw up to 60% drop in CTR.

How does this relate to us small time publishers? Well, since majority of bloggers/publishers rely on Google AdSense, this could bring in more shift in the policy of the program. Remember the belt-tightening with AdSense Referrals?

John adds that if bigtime publishers like Markus Frind are losing money from AdSense, Google itself is also losing ad money since it gets a cut from the publishers. Likewise, since Google does not reveal the percentage of that split to publishers they can change that percentage to their favor and not tell anyone about it.

Analysts are waiting for Microsoft and Nokia to reveal their last quarterly earnings this week to see if it all adds up.

Update: Nokia earnings report are positive. There’s still hope for Apple to sell more iPhones worldwide. Another question is — will iPhone sales growth just offset the iPod’s decline?