By Maureen O'Gara  SCO filed its Chapter 11 reorganization plan with the bankruptcy court in Delaware. The notion of getting $100 million from the oil-rich Arabs has disappeared down the same rat hole as $150-a-barrel oil – yes, folks, even Dubai has been crushed in the global depression – so SCO is ... Jan. 9, 2009 04:15 PM Reads: 176 |
By Maureen O'Gara  The AP, God bless it, was rooting around SEC filings and discovered one sent in by Google on December 15 but not filed electronically and after some difficulty finally managed to lay its hands on a paper copy only to be rewarded with the revelation that the company has “jettisoned a ... Jan. 9, 2009 04:15 PM Reads: 155 |
By Maureen O'Gara  According to a blog nobody ever heard of before called Fudzilla, which itself might serve as a caution but was widely picked up by generally serious people, Microsoft is supposed to announce on January 15, a week before its earnings report, that it is laying off 15,000 people, nearly 1... Jan. 9, 2009 04:15 PM |
By Maureen O'Gara  Ingres, the open source database company, is using Salesforce CRM. Apparently, it’s been using it for the last couple of months. It integrated Salesforce CRM with the Intacct financial management system from the Force.com AppExchange. It says it gives its sales, marketing and finance... Jan. 9, 2009 04:00 PM Reads: 137 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Novell is moving the furniture around again. It is replacing Volker Smid, who has been president of EMEA for the last two years, with Javier Colado, currently VP and general manager of partners, reporting to CEO Ron Hovsepian. Smid, as they say, is leaving to “pursue other interests.... Jan. 9, 2009 04:00 PM Reads: 122 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Sun, which has got a speckled record, to say the least, with acquisitions has acquired Q-layer, a three-year-old cloud computing company in Belgium that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. Sun said the undisclosed price was not material. Since it ... Jan. 9, 2009 04:00 PM Reads: 112 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Despite VCs currently being gun-shy, particularly of Web 2.0 social networking stuff, the little e-mail software start-up Xobni, whose name is inbox backwards, has managed to close a $7 million B round in which Cisco, a new best friend, participated, besides existing backers Khosla Ven... Jan. 9, 2009 03:45 PM |
By Maureen O'Gara  HP US is offering folding money for your recyclable techno-junk, the stuff you’ve been meaning to donate to charity or just get rid of because your wife can’t stand it anymore. If it still works and hasn’t been dropped off a 10-story building it might be worth a few bucks. It doe... Jan. 9, 2009 11:45 AM Reads: 122 |
By Maureen O'Gara  AMD and an equally ambitious Hollywood-type outfit called OTOY are proposing to push HD content through a so-called AMD Fusion Render Cloud, a massively parallel supercomputer said to be unlike any other ever built.
The widgetry is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier an... Jan. 9, 2009 11:30 AM Reads: 544 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Intel said Wednesday morning that its Q4 results, due out next week, are gonna be lousy – which won’t come as a surprise to anybody given all the warning signs; it was just a matter of how bad; now we know. Intel, a harbinger of how things are going throughout high tech, said reven... Jan. 9, 2009 10:00 AM Reads: 305 |
By Maureen O'Gara  The books of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India’s fourth-largest outsourcer, are a tissue of lies – and have been for years – made up out of whole cloth by the company’s founder and chairman, Ramalinga Raju, and his younger brother, its managing director, Rama Raju. Unable to ... Jan. 9, 2009 09:00 AM Reads: 579 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Business at Lenovo, the world’s fourth-largest PC supplier and the repository of IBM’s old PC unit, went from bad to worse the second half of last year because of crippling demand reduction, even in China, its home market, robbing the company of its global springboard and backstop.... Jan. 9, 2009 07:00 AM Reads: 281 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Bracing for a worsening downturn, EMC late Wednesday said it’s going to can 2,400 of its people, roughly 7% of its workforce, to save about $350 million this year and $500 million next year. The move does not impact VMware, which EMC owns the lion’s share of. The news came ahead of... Jan. 9, 2009 07:00 AM Reads: 1,704 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Ireland has suffered through the British, the potato famine, mass migrations and now the latest blight – Dell, the country’s biggest exporter, accounting for 5% of its gross domestic product, deciding to pull up stakes and transfer all its EMEA manufacturing to its new factory in P... Jan. 9, 2009 04:30 AM Reads: 328 |
By Maureen O'Gara  With its CEO whisked off to VMware to be COO, Borland named CFO Erik Prusch acting president and CEO and then confessed that its Q4 results won’t be anything like it imagined. It looks like it’s suffered a $10 million-$30 million shortfall if, as it now says, it expects to report Q... Jan. 8, 2009 07:15 PM Reads: 412 |
By Maureen O'Gara  At the opening keynote of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Wednesday night, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, making his first appearance at the show in a slot that used to be reserved for Bill Gates, announced the widely anticipated, feature-complete beta of the company’s new Windows ... Jan. 8, 2009 09:30 AM Reads: 734 |
By Maureen O'Gara  One Laptop Per Child, the quixotic MIT effort to computerize the children of the third world, has cut its staff and contractors by roughly 50% to keep costs in line. But Negroponte says OLPC will be dedicated to bringing the cost of its laptop down to zero for the least developed count... Jan. 8, 2009 08:05 AM Reads: 256 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, wants to be governor of California. At least that’s the interpretation given the fact that she’s suddenly severed all her board ties, stepping down as a director of Proctor & Gamble, Dreamworks Animation SKG and, of course, eBay. The official ex... Jan. 7, 2009 10:00 AM Reads: 466 |
By Maureen O'Gara  The reason Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been looking like a wraith is due to a mysterious new hormone imbalance that was hard to diagnose but now it has and Jobs expects to fatten up by summer. Jobs released a statement saying so Monday morning hours ahead of MacWorld opening apparently to... Jan. 7, 2009 06:30 AM Reads: 485 |
By Maureen O'Gara  VMware has imported another ex-Microsoft veteran to fight Microsoft, its worst enemy. This time it’s Tod Nielsen plucked out of Borland, where he’s been CEO for the last three years, to be VMware’s chief operating officer, a specially created job that reports to fellow Microsoft ... Jan. 7, 2009 05:55 AM Reads: 387 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Alisoft, the software subsidiary of Alibaba.com, the big Chinese B2B e-commerce portal that Yahoo owns a piece of, has cut a strategic cooperation deal with the municipal government of Nanjing to build China’s first “e-commerce cloud computing center.” It is expected to cost roug... Jan. 7, 2009 05:05 AM Reads: 346 |
By Maureen O'Gara  For reasons it won’t explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs – what exactly it won’t say – and hired some of its people – who exactly it won’t comment on – for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. EMC described the purchase as “very small.” Jan. 6, 2009 08:45 AM Reads: 411 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Adobe and Intel plan to collaborate on porting Adobe’s Flash widgetry to Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100, a way to put Flash-enhanced web content and rich Flash applications on television. The chip is bound for cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail-conne... Jan. 6, 2009 04:05 AM Reads: 470 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Michael Dell is going to try to turn a buck on the mortgage mess. He’s part of a consortium of seven private equity investors that signed a letter of intent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on New Year’s Eve to buy the failed IndyMac Bank, one of the accursed e... Jan. 5, 2009 06:00 AM Reads: 749 |
By Maureen O'Gara  New Year’s Eve, when folks in New York were bellying up to the bar to see out a really horrible year, Dell announced that it was reorganizing again in its search for an elixir for its sagging profits, depressed revenues, eroding market share and shrunken stock price in the midst of a... Jan. 2, 2009 06:30 AM Reads: 959 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Credit Suisse thinks the virtual PC market will be worth at least $1.5 billion by 2011, representing 25.6 million users or 5.7% of the professional desktop installed base. Dec. 22, 2008 11:30 AM Reads: 725 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Novell has pulled the plug on BrainShare – for 20 years its trademark user conference – which was scheduled for March in Salt Lake City. Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon says on the company’s web site that people wouldn’t commit to coming because of cost restraints. ... Dec. 19, 2008 05:45 PM Reads: 479 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Former Intel CEO and industry demigod Andy Grove, still an Intel advisor, is pushing the company to go into the electric car battery business, according to the Wall Street Journal. There is little manufacturing capacity in the US, giving the edge to China and Japan, and effective batte... Dec. 19, 2008 05:30 PM Reads: 697 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Dell says it’s changing the way it packs its desktops and laptops for shipping to save upwards of $8 million over the next four years. It will cut out about 20 million pounds of packaging material, roughly 10% of what it uses, saving about 150,000 trees. It will also use more recycle... Dec. 19, 2008 05:15 PM Reads: 533 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Google has disappeared from the Top 20 list of companies trusted with privacy in TRUSTe’s fifth annual survey. American Express came in first followed by eBay (2), IBM (3), HP (6), Apple (8), Intuit (12), Yahoo (14) and Facebook (15). Dec. 19, 2008 05:00 PM Reads: 1,240 |
By Maureen O'Gara  The latest in a long line of Yahoo execs to hit the trail is Joseph Siino, the guy who built its IP department. He’s decided to try his hand monetizing patents, but hasn’t said where yet. In his farewell e-mail to the troops, he claimed Yahoo’s IP is worth billions of dollars. Dec. 19, 2008 05:00 PM Reads: 580 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Sun is going to shut its plant in Linlithgow, Scotland, its only factory outside the US, throwing about 140 people on the street. The move is part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce. Dec. 19, 2008 04:45 PM Reads: 605 |
By Maureen O'Gara  After the curtain closes in January, Apple will be pulling out of the annual IDG-own Macworld that’s been a touchstone for the Apple-fancying press and the company’s fans. CEO Steve Jobs is not going to show up this time, leading to speculation about the state of his health. There... Dec. 19, 2008 04:30 PM Reads: 432 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Google, which made Mozilla rich supporting Firefox because Google was its default search engine, has dropped the browser as the default in its so-called Google Pack software collection in favor of its own shiny new out-of-beta Chrome browser. The freebie one-download Google Pack includ... Dec. 19, 2008 03:45 PM Reads: 1,116 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Google has denied it, but the Wall Street Journal hasn't retracted a reportedly documented story it ran Monday saying that Google has been chatting up cable and phone companies trying to get "a fast lane for its own content," a tactic that puts the lie to Google's publicly ostensible "... Dec. 19, 2008 03:45 PM Reads: 894 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Yahoo up and said the other day that starting next month it will anonymize any personal user data stemming from searches, page views, ad views, page clicks and ad clicks in 90 days – a broader policy than anybody else’s got although how effective the scrubbing will be is unclear. A... Dec. 19, 2008 01:30 PM Reads: 530 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Three quarters after cutting the OEM deal, Dell has started delivering PAN, Egenera’s data center virtualization and management software, in North America. The Egenera widgetry has been parlayed into a factory-integrated, turnkey solution delivered on Dell servers and storage, meant ... Dec. 19, 2008 01:15 PM Reads: 606 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Sun has put out its promised UltraSparc T2 Reference Design Kit (RDK), meant to accelerate the design, development and testing of T2 processor-based embedded systems designs. T2 has eight cores and eight threads per core, and boasts one of the industry’s highest energy efficiencies p... Dec. 19, 2008 12:45 PM Reads: 561 |
By Maureen O'Gara  The Linux Foundation has named Linux kernel developer Theodore Ts’o CTO, replacing Markus Rex, who’s gone back home to Novell. Ts’o is currently a Linux Foundation fellow, a position he’s had for the last year. He was the first North American kernel developer. Since 2001, Ts’... Dec. 19, 2008 12:45 PM Reads: 436 |
By Maureen O'Gara  Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that’s supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months, which, Red Hat says, is three times long... Dec. 19, 2008 12:30 PM Reads: 443 |