Technology Industry Archive

In the wake of layoffs, people wring their hands and think that the sky is falling. Sometimes historical perspective can be useful, and as a report from outsourcing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas notes, as bad as it seems now, it’s been far worse. According to their figures, high tech companies cut 186,955 jobs last year. Take electronics, computers, and telecom together, and the...

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Nintendo’s latest results show that it continues to dominate its gaming competition, in units. But net income is down and a modified forecast shows that even the Wii will face challenges. Nintendo goes Wii, Wii, Wii, all the way home Nintendo has been notable not just for having the two leading console models on the market, but for making money. Revenue for the first nine months of the...

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Sony has just released its unaudited results for its third quarter ending December 31. While PS3 software unit sales was a slight bright spot, overall the news is pretty bad, due to worldwide PS3 sales trailing Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox, decreasing sales of PS2 and PSP hardware and software, and the strengthening of the yen against the euro and U.S. dollar. First, hardware...

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Last week I mentioned how Cisco was entering the server market and how this was just the continuation of a diversification trend we’ve already been seeing. I also mentioned how more examples would be popping up. Another already has: HP is coming out with data switches built for datacenter applications. High tech battling to ensue HP, a fixture for decades in datacenter server racks, is...

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In recent earnings announcements, the eyes have been on revenues and profits. Who has managed to keep ahead despite economic conditions, and whose star seems to have been waning? But given those very conditions, it may be that there’s too much attention on earnings and not enough on cash, which is, after all, supposed to be king in bad times. But check a number of leading high tech...

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IBM Might Face EU Investigation — Florida-based mainframe vendor T3 has filed a complaint in the EU against IBM for refusing to sell its z/OS operating system to companies using T3 hardware. [Source: Computerworld] The plot to kill Google — Wired has an interesting story about the interplay of law and lobbying when it came to keeping the deal between Google and Yahoo from going...

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A number of people criticized my previous piece on Sony’s PS3 because I didn’t have worldwide unit sales numbers. And that was fair (though some of those commenting clearly needed some warm milk and a rest), because you can’t reasonable take U.S. sales to represent what the rest of the world might do. So I did some digging and found some numbers for Sony itself. Given that the...

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By now you’ve probably already heard that Microsoft missed analysts’ expectations and will cut up to 5,000 jobs. That’s painful, though less severe than had been rumored. But when you look at the financial results, they suggest that Microsoft’s real problem is on the desktop and online. Look at the numbers below from Microsoft’s latest 10-Q. Two divisions –...

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The news that Cisco will push into the server market might seem like a big surprise — and a big departure from its traditional base of networking equipment. But if you think about the direction computing is moving, it’s not really surprising, and probably only one of a number of examples of radical diversification that will be coming in the next year or two. The New York Times was...

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It always seems presumptuous to sound a death knell for an enormous company. So perhaps this is more a bell closing round seven of a fight, but on the gaming front, Sony is looking bad. Really bad. And because of the company’s overall financial position, it will take far more than posturing to keep the console division in the game at all. On the largely disappointing recent holiday retail...

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