In my opinion Adobe are paying for a lack of innovation in their main product lines. Is Photoshop CS4 so much better than CS3 that the upgrade is a 'must-have'? Dreamweaver is probably slightly less relevant in an age of content management systems and the proliferation of Flash tools doesn't seem to add much, whilst Microsoft are promoting their own alternative and standards-based web browsers are getting good enough to erode the advantages of Flash.

EA, in their own way, have spent the last decade getting bigger and bigger, spending larger and larger sums of money. They were bound to come a cropper sooner or later, and we're somewhere near the end of the console upgrade cycle with console sales falling as everyone who wants a PS3 or a Wii already has one.

The last year has been fairly tough in comparison to previous years. It has exposed a lot of errors to the harsh light of day and has made companies think twice about their strategies. But it does seem, to me at least, that we're over the worst of it now and the redundancies at Adobe or EA are more of a reflection of the failure to meet last year's growth targets than a prediction of worse things to come.