Intel Hit with $1.45 Billion Fine

May 15th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: amd, cpu, eu, illegal, intel, market, rebate, share

Intel has been handed down a record 1.06 Billion Euro ($1.45 billion) fine for antitrust violations in Europe regarding Intel’s long-time rival – AMD.

After over 8 years of investigation, European regulators have finally found Intel guilty of using illegal methods to prevent AMD from getting free access to the microchip market. These violations include special “payments” (read bribes) to computer manufacturers to exclude or delay the implementation of products using AMD chips. Intel was also found guilty of paying illegal rebates to encourage retailers to only stock products that contained Intel chips.

“Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years”

said Neelie Kroes, a European Union Competition Commissioner, in a news conference after the ruling.

As a result, Intel was called to immediately stop its illegal practices and pay the $1.45 billion fine within 3 months. This is the largest fine ever imposed by the EU, more than the 896 million euro fine in 2007 on Saint-Gobain for their price-fixing.

The ruling finally sees AMD’s pleas heard, who have been complaining that Intel has been practicing these methods for quite a few years now – ultimately shutting the door on AMD.

“The ruling is hugely important,”

says Nathan Brookwood, an anylst at Insight 64,

“MD has been out there for the last five or six years screaming that Intel has been keeping them from getting free access to markets.”

Despite optimism being expressed by AMD, experts believe that Intel will simply shrug off the fine and keep on dominating the market, as they have done since their introduction of the Core series of processors a few years ago. They (and myself included) believe that this will aid AMD’s market share by a small margin, but won’t cause Intel any serious harm.

Intel’s attempts at contesting the case have so far been unsuccessful.

[via Reuters]

Popularity: 40% [?]

Microsoft Let’s Another 3,000 Employees Go

May 5th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: bailout, economy, employees, fired, jobs, microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Following the order to pay $388 million in damages, and the shutdown of both Encarta and adCenter Analytics, Microsoft has announced that it has fired 3,000 employees in its second wave of the company’s cost-cutting initiative.

Microsoft employees received the following email from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bearing the bad news yesterday:

From: Steve Ballmer

Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009

To: Microsoft – All Employees

Subject: Update: Realigning Resources and Reducing CostsIn January, in response to the global economic downturn, I announced our plan to adjust the company’s cost structure through spending reductions and job eliminations. Today, we are implementing the second phase of this plan.

This is difficult news to share. Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.

Today’s action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.

With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it’s important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.

As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job eliminations.

For those of you directly affected by today’s announcement, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and assure you that we will continue to provide support as we did during the previous job eliminations.

And for everyone across the company, I want to reemphasize how much I appreciate the way you have pulled together to help the company respond to this difficult economic environment. There’s no doubt that these are very challenging times. But together, we are making the right choices to ensure that we will continue to deliver great products and position ourselves for strong future growth and profitability.

Thank you for your continued hard work, commitment, and focus.

Steve

The announcement is part of the second phase of Microsoft’s announcement in January to remove 5,000 full-time employees from its payroll by June 2010. 1,400 employees were let go then, with 3,000 more being asked to leave now. That means that the job cuts are nearly over, which totaled around more than 5% of the software giant’s workforce.

The victims of today’s job cut are from various countries around the world, including the US.

As mentioned in the email, fired employees have until next year June to find a new place to work, and Microsoft has informed everyone that it has set aside $237 million for severance for laid-off employees.

Microsoft is still planning to hire 2,000-3,000 new employees within the next 18 months.

But what good will that do financially?

[via ComputerWorld]

Popularity: 47% [?]

Oracle Buys Sun for $7.4 Billion

April 20th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: company, java, microsystems, mysql, oracle, server, sun, takeover

Following Sun Microsystems’ decline of around $7 billion from IBM, the company has accepted an acquisition offer of $7.4 billion from Oracle.

The deal was announced today between Sun and Oracle that Sun will be purchased at a premium price of $9.50 per share in cash, valuing Sun Microsystems at a grand total of $7.4 billion. It was speculated that IBM also offered Sun $9.50 per share a few weeks ago.

Safra Catz, the president of Oracle said the following in a statement regarding the takeover:

We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.

The Sun-Oracle deal was unanimously agreed on by the Sun board, which means that Sun Microsystems is a lot more comfortable with the terms and agreements offered by Oracle. You may recall that the licensing agreements presented by IBM in their acquisition offer resulted in the deal falling apart at the last minute.

Oracle is planning to monetize Sun as much as possible in a bid to turn around the $209 million quarterly loss and 11% year over year drop in profits Sun has been suffering from. The acquisition boosted Sun’s shares by 35% to $9.07 per share.

With the Sun acquisition, Oracle has also managed to get its hands on both MySQL and Java in one move – something I’m sure their very pleased about. In 2007 Oracle reportedly offered Sun $850 million for MySQL, which Sun ultimately turned down. What’s worrying users is Oracle’s intent to make money from MySQL, which has been freely available (and has gained incredible popularity) as a web database, which powers the website you’re reading right now.

Popularity: 18% [?]

IT Pay Drops Slightly In Q1 2009

April 17th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: c++, hp, Industry, IT, java, job, money, pay, skills, sun

Photo by Cayusa

A recently released study reveals that there has been a 0.5% decrease in the amount of money IT experts are being paid for services in the first quarter of 2009.

The study was conducted by Foote Partners, a research firm that actively monitors IT skills payment.

The main casualties are C++, AIX, dBase and AIX, which saw a 25% drop in pay when compared to Q1 2008. This isn’t as bad as PowerBuilder however, who’s coders’ pay declined by 50% when compared to a year before in the uncertified skills category.

Not all is looking down however – 46 skills actually rose in value in Q1 2009. Linux skills grew a whopping 28.6% in the uncertified skills category. As did Apache Web server skills and Java skills, whom also saw significant gains to 25% and 20% respectively.

The certified skills pay tell a similar story, with both major gains and losses. Pay for HP/Certified Systems Engineers grew by a solid 14.3%, with Sun Certified Java programmers and HP/Accredited Integration Specialists got a comfortable bump of 13.5% and 12.5% respectively.

On the other end of the spectrum, Prosoft Master CIW Administration payment fell by 25% – which is rather significant.

The full report is available here.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Bluetooth 3.0 Set to Launch On April 21

April 10th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: 3.0, bluetooth, cellphone, mobile, phone, technology

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is planning an official launch of the latest Bluetooth (3.0) specification on April 21.

The new Bluetooth 3.0 specification will bring with it dramatically increased transfer speeds by switching over to the 802.11 protocol. This should allow users to send much larger files, quicker. Naturally, backwards compatibility exists, and plays a clever role in reducing battery consumption.

When two bluetooth 3.0 devices communicate with each other they switch to the 3.0 specification when a transfer beings, and once the transfer is completed the modules return to the old (and slower) specification to save on battery, whilst  insuring backwards compatibility with all non-3.0 bluetooth devices.

The announcement hasn’t officially been made yet, but it is expected to be made a few days from now.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Microsoft Ordered to Pay $388 million

April 9th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: appeal, court, fine, microsoft, uniloc

Following a court battle with Uniloc regarding an anti-piracy patent has resulted in Microsoft being ordered by a jury to pay $388 million in damages.

The case was originally filed way back in October 2003, with the initial trial resulting in a victory for Microsoft. Uniloc appealed this decision, their reasoning being that Microsoft’s witness that was instrumental to their victory had conflicting interests. The appeal must’ve had some merit, as Uniloc ended up winning the second trial – at the expense of Microsoft.

“We are very disappointed in the jury verdict”

says Microsoft spokesperson David Bowermaster,

“We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported. We will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”

So it looks like an appeal from Microsoft is likely to result in yet another extension of the court case later this year.

The news brought a slight drop in Microsoft shares, down to $19.19 from after-hours trading,  from a high of $19.62.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Sun Rejects IBM Offer, Shares Nosedive

April 6th, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: deal, ibm, merge, microsystems, server, sun, unix

In a surprise move, Sun Microsystems turns down IBM’s offer for acquisition. IBM responded by withdrawing its offer indefinitely. This is an unexpected occurrence, as a few days ago New York Times sources reported that a Sun-IBM deal was sure to be agreed on.

After the announcement of the IBM withdrawal, Sun’s shares dropped by a whopping 23% today to $6.68 per share. It should come as a relief however to Sun stockholders that despite a 23% drop in value, Sun shares are still way above  the $4.97 per share price-point that it was trading at prior to the IBM acquisition talks.It is reported that IBM’s offer was around the $9.40 mark per share (not the $9.50 per share price expected last week), resulting in Sun Microsystems being valued at $7 billion.

Sun stated, thus far, that the deal was turned down due to the offer being undervalued, as well as licensing agreements that were far to flexible – potentially allowing IBM to walk away from any deal at any time they pleased. The Wall Street Journal has an article stating that in addition to the above disputes about the deal, the Sun board is split on a decision.

Either way, it appears as if Sun will remain independent for a time being, as the company wasn’t exactly being contested by other companies looking to increase their hold on the server market.

Popularity: 10% [?]

IBM Will Buy Sun for $7 Billion

April 3rd, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: company, ibm, server, share, sun, unix

IBM is almost sure to buy rival Sun Microsystems for $7 billion or at $9.50 per share.

This deal has been going on for an extremely long time, from IBM combing through Sun’s contracts and licensing deals to IBM decreasing its bid from $10 a share to $9.50. It finally seems to be drawing to a close, and if the deal is sealed (which The New York Times’ sources claim is almost sure to go through) IBM will have market dominance in UNIX-based servers.

Sun has been struggling for a large amount of time financially, but many people will be said to see the creators of Java, MySQL, and the Solaris operating system go. Many also question whether Solaris will survive the takeover. More worryingly however is that with Sun under IBM control, only Fujitsu and HP are left in a UNIX market that is dominated by IBM.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Netflix Delivers Its 2 Billionth Movie

April 2nd, 2009 • Featured, Industry
Tags: blu-ray, dvd, milestone, netflix, rental

Netflix, the extremely popular online DVD and Blu-Ray Disc rental service, has announced that it shipped its 2 billionth movie yesterday. Not only that, but the lucky recipient of the 2 billionth disc received a complimentary lifetime membership.

Netflix has grown substantially since its original launch towards the end of 1999. The rental services now ships just under 2 million discs across the US every day to 10 million subscribers from a library of over 100,000 films. That’s quite a substantial growth pattern for a company that’s nearly 10 years old.

The 2 billionth movie shipped was “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”, which was mailed to Clay Shannon.

Popularity: 6% [?]

UPDATE: ‘Imminent’ Sony Playstation Announcement Coming [Rumor]

March 30th, 2009 • 1 comment Featured, Industry
Tags: announcement, playstation, price_cut, ps2, ps3, rumor, sony

Update: It appears that the announcement was indeed the $99 Playstation 2, as reported by ShackNews.

The internet world is currently buzzing with the rumor that Sony will be making an important announcement concerning the Playstation tomorrow.

The rumor was first posted on Smarthouse, and was later confirmed by Kotaku who was contacted directly by Sony to confirm an announcement was coming.

There are quite a few ideas and theories as to what Sony is planning to announce. Some people reckon a PS3 or PS2 price drop, whilst some commentators joke that it might be the PS4. What can be assured however is that the truth will come out tomorrow.

Expect updates soon.

Popularity: 9% [?]