It’s merger mania in the tech industry. First Dell buys Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. Then Xerox purchases Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion. Now Cisco is acquiring Tandberg for nearly $3 billion in cash.
It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here.
Hard to believe that this is good news: Cisco reported a 46 percent decline in quarterly profit this afternoon. An appalling drop. But one that investors welcomed, because as lousy as its performance might seem, Cisco’s earnings still managed to beat the Street.
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, developer of the Flip digital video camera, may prove an ill-timed one. For while the Flip currently dominates the market that it largely created, it’s about to be taken to the mat by a new and formidable rival: Apple.
The 1,500 to 2,000 job cuts announced during Cisco’s second-quarter earnings call are apparently well under way. Sources say the company is sacking upward of 600 employees at its Silicon Valley headquarters today.
If there was any doubt that Ned Hooper is Cisco CEO John Chambers’s likely heir apparent, it disappeared today when the company named him chief strategy officer. For Hooper, who was already waist-deep in corporate strategy at Cisco as senior vice president corporate development and head of its consumer division, this is quite a promotion.
With smartphones as apt to be running personal productivity apps as business productivity ones, the divide between enterprise devices and their consumer counterparts appears to have finally been bridged. To wit, these comments from Cisco CEO John Chambers, who says the days of the so-called corporate device are ending.
Larry Ellison’s got some news for skeptics predicting Oracle will dump the Sun Microsystems hardware business when its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company closes: It’s not gonna happen. In an interview with Reuters subsequently filed with the SEC, the Oracle CEO said he plans to maintain that part of Sun’s business.
Cisco opened its books this afternoon and what they revealed wasn’t exactly pretty: declining profit and slumping sales. Not the sort of performance you hope for in a tech bellwether. But clearly Cisco has been beaten into submission by the econalypse just like everyone else.
The econalypse is eroding demand for telecommunications equipment. Operators are cutting spending on network upgrades. Market conditions are tough, but we are taking appropriate actions. It’s a story we’ve heard before, from Ericsson, Nortel and Cisco. This morning we heard it from Alcatel-Lucent.
Technically, the term refers to the frenzied flow of games and the intensity of the contenders for the NCAA Championship crown. But the NCAA doesn’t have a corner on “March Madness”–those descriptors work well in other instances, too. To wit:
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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