“We are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. So said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in May at the start of a second round of cuts that claimed the livelihoods of some 3,000 employees. Now, six months later, the company is finishing the job. Sources tell TechFlash that Microsoft will make additional job reductions this week–beginning as early as today.
How badly does AT&T want to renew its iPhone exclusivity contract with Apple? Pretty damn badly. Posting third-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations this morning, AT&T said it activated a record 3.2 million iPhones during the period. Of those, 40 percent were for customers new to the carrier.
Four years after separating its PC business from its imaging and printing group, Hewlett-Packard is planning to merge them, undoing one of Mark Hurd’s first big moves as CEO. “People familiar with the situation” tell The Wall Street Journal that the plan under consideration would combine HP’s printer and PC businesses under Todd Bradley, who currently oversees only the latter.
Wise is the investor holding shares in Apple, Research in Motion and/or Palm, because these companies are the triumvirate of tech’s new world order. This according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, who in a research note today says all three are positioned for leadership in the “huge, nascent and underpenetrated” smartphone market.
With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the handset industry what it has done to the PC industry with the Mac: Claiming an inordinate share of profits relative to revenue. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that Apple, though it is only the fifth-largest handset vendor, claimed nearly a third of handset industry profits in the first half of 2009.
YouTube may be losing money, but it’s not losing nearly as much as some claim. Certainly not the $470 million that Credit Suisse projected in April, citing massive infrastructure costs. According to IT research outfit RampRate, a more realistic assessment of YouTube’s operating loss for 2009 is $174 million, nearly $300 million less than Credit Suisse’s estimate.
Motorola’s first-quarter results came in stronger than expected, although that’s not saying much because the situation at the ailing wireless handset maker appears to be increasingly dire. Motorola shipped about 19.2 million handsets in its fourth quarter. In its latest quarter, the company shipped just 14.7 million handsets, down 23 percent from the previous one.
EBay reported Q1 sales and earnings this afternoon that fell from the same quarter last year, but beat analysts’ estimates just the same. The company’s revenue totaled $2.02 billion, down 7.8 percent from $2.19 billion in 2008. Earnings were 39 cents per share. Analysts had been expecting worse, with estimates of 1.94 billion in revenue and earnings of 34 cents per share.
With its speech synthesizers, brain current-operated controls and solar power source, the device described in Monec Holding’s patent–“electronic device, preferably an electronic book”–would seem to have little in common with Apple’s iPhone. Still, it is a “light-weight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” and “a power source.” And these days, that’s enough file suit over…
EMC posted fourth-quarter financials today, reporting sales that were basically in line with projections and earnings that slipped 45 percent from a year ago. Though its profits sank, the company managed to hit all its financial marks for the fourth quarter–something it won’t be doing in the current one. Because the worldwide economic situation has grown so grim and uncertain, EMC has opted not to provide a first-quarter projection, let alone a full-year outlook. Why risk setting expectations too high, right?
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.
Good thing Facebook is committed to growth over profits because according to the latest metrics from Hitwise Intelligence, growth is slowing. While traffic in the United Kingdom to the site did increase by 4 percent between August and September this year, it’s down from 50 percent over the same period last year.
Microsoft must be so proud. The company’s $240 million investment in Facebook, one that implicitly valued the social network at $15 billion, hasn’t yet paid off. But it will. In three years or so when Facebook finally settles on a business model. Assuming, of course, it’s a viable one.
Thank God for IBM. The technology bellwether gave battered investors a chance to catch their breath Thursday after it said it expects to report a 20 percent increase in net income for its third quarter and, remarkably, claimed its profit outlook for the full year remains on track.
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.
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.
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.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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