One of the points made by host Geoff Colvin, our moderator and Sr. Editor at Fortune, was that old – but – true saw, that when the going gets tough, the tough get going.  (He was much more eloquent than this.)  The essential message was clear: more market share is exchanged during tough times than during good times.  It was a point echoed by a couple of other speakers on the same day.

I expect we will see quite a bit more of this before the current cycle is through, in all major industries.  In the tech world, we just saw Oracle play the white knight for Sun, after IBM seemed unwilling to catch the falling knife of Sun’s street value.  (This was probably the best combination Sun could have dreamed of, given the choices.) 

Who is up for grabs?  Almost everyone is fair game in this situation, and size is not always the determining characteristic of the acquirer; aggression is.  And, as everyone knows, the average for successful mergers is something around 25%; it is often a useful technique for confusing investors while mis-managing.  Even so, or perhaps for that reason as well, I think it is time to get ready for a series of large moves in the technology world. 

This trend will apply both to those you think deserve it (Sun and Nortel, per my call last year), Motorola, Yahoo! (by divisions) and others, but also, potentially, to many companies we don’t think of normally as purchase candidates. 

Get ready.

“Nortel. One of my tests for companies headed south: I can’t tell you their strategy in a sentence. And wanting to sell products, or being the coolest company in Ontario, do not qualify as goals or strategies.”

Yesterday Nortel filed for bankruptcy, ending perhaps the most successful story of a tech company in Canadian history.

Our sympathies go out to those many brilliant engineers and others in Brampton who tried hard, but couldn’t quite right the ship.

All of which leads to the category of Companies on the Road South, often exacerbated by the current economic climate, but almost always already in dire straits for some other reason.

Here are three obvious nominees for this dubious award:

Yahoo!  Although my friend Matt McIlwain thinks Disney is the likely white knight here, whoever gets it will be paying almost nothing for the privilege.  And if top officers keep leaving, they will be getting almost nothing, too.

Nortel.  One of my tests for companies headed south: I can’t tell you their strategy in a sentence.  And wanting to sell products, or being the coolest company in Ontario, do not qualify as goals or strategies.

Sun.  With the final sunsetting of its proprietary server edge, due, in my opinion, over the next twelve months, exactly what business does that leave Sun in?  Selling free Java kits?  Giving away Office competitors software?  Writing blogs?

Sun, Nortel and Yahoo! have been great companies in their time, but each lost direction, loaded up on way too much hubris, and blew the ego/value ratio out the door, on the way to that fabled Road South.

One hopes they’ll find happy homes inside some other company somewhere, since they still have many skilled employees who deserve better, and since the chances of them being an independent company a year from now are vanishingly small.