While the highlight 
of the week was undoubtedly Apple’s Rock and Roll event on Wednesday featuring Steve Jobs 2.0, that was only the anodized aluminum, candy-colored, video-shooting cherry on top of another week of tech sector reporting from All Things Digital.
Too bad Palm launched the Pre a week after the close of its fiscal fourth quarter. If it had brought the device to market earlier, the quarterly results it posted Thursday afternoon might have been even better. After market close, Palm posted a narrower-than-expected loss despite a steep revenue decline, sending its shares up more than 10 percent.
Investors are putting a lot of faith in the Pre’s ability to drag Palm back to its feet again. Despite the magnitude of the third-quarter miss the company warned of Tuesday, its shares are trading higher today, at one point reaching a peak of $7.86. It seems the market’s so taken with the Pre that it’s willing to overlook a jaw-dropping $70 million revenue shortfall.
Told that Macworld Expo 2009 will be Apple’s last, and the first that CEO Steve Jobs does not keynote, investors behaved much as you’d imagine, dragging the company’s shares into the mud in after-hours trading. Fueling the panic: obvious concerns about Jobs’s well-being. And, of course, speculation that Macworld is likely to disappoint devotees hoping for the introduction of some insanely great new product. But would Apple really send Senior VP Phil Schiller out onto the Macworld stage without a cool new product to introduce?
Perhaps Macworld Expo 2009 will have its “one more thing” after all. In a note to clients this morning, Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research speculates that Apple will indeed launch a new product category at Macworld in early January. A netbook.
Apple may not announce any new product categories at MacWorld come January, but it will uncrate an update to at least one old one: the Mac Mini. An “Apple corporate employee” tells Wired that the diminutive desktop has received a long overdue upgrade that’s to be revealed at the annual expo.
Today brought with it nasty news for Motorola. Standard & Poor’s slashed its corporate credit rating on the long-suffering handset maker, noting that the company’s troubled mobile business is likely to continue what is already a two-year downward slide.
Next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo show floor will be quite a bit easier to navigate than in years past. With registration down by 20 percent over last year, there are likely to be far fewer attendees, and with a growing list of companies pulling out of the show, there’ll be fewer booths for them to crowd. Earlier this week, Adobe said it had decided against exhibiting on the show floor. A coterie of other companies is joining it, top among them, Belkin, which has also pulled out of exhibiting at CES. What’s next–a Super Bowl boycott?
Research In Motion’s downside guidance for the third quarter is playing hell with the company’s share price today. After market close Tuesday, RIM said revenues for the three months ended November will fall short of its earlier forecast. The company blamed the news on product-launch timing, general economic conditions and foreign-exchange volatility, but could there be something else at work here a well? Like an uncompelling product line?
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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