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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.

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So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous.

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World-wide PC shipments will be lousy in 2009, but not quite as lousy as previously thought. Gartner says they’ll fall six percent for the year, which is an improvement over the 6.6 percent drop it forecast last month and the 9.2 percent decline it projected back in March.

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Looks like Yahoo has found its new CFO. This afternoon, the company said Tim Morse will take charge of its finances. Morse, who has served as CFO for chip maker Altera since 2007 and spent 15 years at GE before that, will start work on June 17 and assume CFO responsibilities on July 1.

Welcome news, since Yahoo has been looking to fill the position since Blake Jorgensen said he would step down from the company last February.

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Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at the D conference last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out. On Wednesday, Palm tapped Rubinstein as its new CEO.

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The econalypse and the job losses and lower housing starts it’s brought with it are having a nasty effect on Comcast’s bottom line. And according to CEO Brian Roberts, that’s not going to change any time soon. “It’s still a scary time,” he said in remarks at Sanford Bernstein’s 25th annual Strategic Decisions Conference in New York.

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Hewlett-Packard’s second-quarter financials may have been in line with forecasts, but they were troubling nonetheless. A number of analysts predicted that the company might report better-than-expected earnings. Sadly, it did not.

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Apple and Research in Motion may disagree on many things, but they’re of the same mind when it comes to the the netbook phenomenon: It will be short-lived. Asked about Apple’s interest in the category during a late-April earnings call, COO Tim Cook said the company has none. Turns out, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie feels pretty much the same way.

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Ouch. European regulators slapped Intel with an antitrust fine and, as expected, it’s a large one–a record $1.45 billion, which dwarfs even the $1.2 billion fine levied against Microsoft in 2008. The largest ever assessed for monopoly abuse, the fine follows charges that Intel abused its market dominance by illegally inducing PC manufacturers to use its chips over those of rival AMD.

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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.

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After three years, AMD is finally getting around to merging it’s microprocessor and graphics divisions, another stab at reaching profitability after more than two years of losses. On Wednesday afternoon the company said it would consolidate the two divisions into one–platforms and products–led by SVP Rick Bergman.

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Question for you: What was the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2009? What’s that? Apple’s iPhone? Wrong. According to market researcher NPD, it was Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Curve, which slipped past the iconic device in market share bolstered by Verizon’s Buy One, Get One promotion.

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Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says that the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks. Google appears to have taken that message to heart because it’s launching a new venture fund at a time when the VC industry is busy practicing its duck-for-cover exercises.

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