The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America 
New York’s most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge users thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on their desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg’s already low-volume business just got smaller at time 
The benefit of a merger like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their profits and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it’s one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch 
On February 27, 2007 Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, 
Investment bank Marlin and Associates 
The collapse of so many major financial institutions in the past year, and over the past few days especially, is hard to fathom in its enormity. Sometimes you need a good visual to put things in perspective. The New York Times has an interactive graphic 
up on its site that pretty much says it all. It shows that $4 trillion has been wiped off the total market capitalization of the U.S. stock market since last October. Of that, nearly $1 trillion is from the decline in the financial sector alone.
Each box in the graphic is proportional to the size of the market capitalization of the biggest financial firms then and now. As you mouse over the squares, you can see how much each value each company lost between October 9, 2007 and September 12, 2008. Here are some of the individual losses by market cap:
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