Ever heard of a shake out at the end of a slump?

We should have guessed how bad the news out of Cable & Wireless would be. Last week the global telco refused to confirm reports it was about to cut half its London workforce. It must have thought the leak wasn't that bad. Today it announced 1,500 losses, a £6.5bn write-down and a major reassessment of its assets - with a keen eye on its domestic business.

Less than two years ago silicon.com published a leader entitled 'The strange success of C&W'. Back then the company had billions in the bank from timely sales of assets - including Hong Kong Telecom, UK cableco CWC and its 50 per cent share in One2One, now T-Mobile - just before a slump in values.

The world was its oyster and it chose to address the world. With hindsight it is easy to say the web and IP hosting market wouldn't mature fast enough for C&W. Buying Digital Island and certain global assets from Exodus and PSINet was a huge gamble - and one that hasn't paid off.

Analysts have today been quick to applaud C&W's focus on profitability and tried and trusted businesses. But how much would we have lambasted a risk-averse C&W sitting on top of a cash mountain?

PDA company Handspring never had much of a cash mountain but it did have a lot in its favour. Pedigree, in the form of PalmPilot pioneers and 3Com alumni Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, and great designs, to name but two things.

But like a cavalier C&W, about 18 months ago it decided to concentrate on wirelessly connected PDAs. It introduced the impressive Treo, a Palm OS-based GSM phone and PDA all-in-one device. Only it was too far ahead of the market.

Market share crashed and now Handspring is being acquired by Palm, which seems like a natural exit/acquisition.

It may just turn out Palm has picked the bottom of the downturn to make a move. Or it may be that the PDA market will stagnate for some time to come - consider sales of 25 million devices compared to an annual bonanza of 400 million units for mobile handset vendors.

Another player hoping to have chosen the bottom of the downturn to make its move is recruitment company Spring Group. It has bought UK competitor Best International and odds are on a few other sector buys and busts before too long.

The move is also a natural one, given current conditions, but a far cry from the heady days of astronomical contractor day rates and skills crises - all of three years ago.

Spring's CEO was reluctant to call the bottom of the downturn. And he's right. There may be a lot more shaking out to do before we can truly say we're on the up and up again.