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The InformationWeek April 2005 Archive « March 2005 | Main | May 2005 » |
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Here We Go Again: Oracle, Yawn, Said To Have New Target
Tell me if you're heard this one: Reports are circulating that Oracle is on the acquisition prowl again. This time, the target is said to be none other than a longtime Larry Ellison nemesis, customer-relationship-management pioneer Tom Siebel and his struggling Siebel Systems Inc.
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Same Old Story
It’s déjà vu all over again – but is anyone listening this time?
A panel of top-tier user companies this week once again sounded the call for software vendors to start delivering better quality products.
They also made it clear that they long to be close to you – vendors that is. For all the endless marketing blather we hear about customer relationship management, it’s clear that the only kinks to be worked out are not just in the software.
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The Software Industry's Conundrum
If there's any one theme attendees at this week's Software 2005 conference should have walked away with, it's that this is an industry that has some big issues to tackle.
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Processor Numbers Adding Up For AMD
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has enjoyed a renaissance in its long and often seemingly futile battle with Intel for a significant position in the microprocessor business over the past two years with its ability to first establish its 64-bit x86-based architecture, and more recently when it beat Intel to the punch in shipping dual-core servers chips. Despite those technology achievements, AMD reported a net loss of $17 million in the first quarter, due primarily to and operating loss of $110 million from its flash memory business. Beneath the surface was an improved market position in its core microprocessor market. While Intel was reporting relatively flat microprocessor sales in the first quarter, AMD reported record server and mobile processor shipments.
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Microsoft Is Hiring--But It Can?t Find Enough
Skilled Labor, Bill Gates Says
Are you more worried about an IT worker shortage in the United States or an IT job shortage? It’s a tricky question. Unemployment among IT workers is about 3.7%. Not bad if you are an IT worker. Meanwhile, salaries are up about 6%, according to InformationWeek’s annual Salary Survey. Not bad. But for a company like Microsoft, an IT worker shortage is causing problems on the hiring front. During a panel discussion about U.S. innovation at a Microsoft Research Tech Fair today in Washington, D.C., Bill Gates said Microsoft is having trouble finding enough skilled people to fill jobs at multiple levels. “The jobs are there and they are high-paying jobs, but we are not seeing the pipeline [of talented job applicants] as it used to be. This creates a dilemma for us on how we get work done.”
Continue reading "Microsoft Is Hiring--But It Can?t Find Enough
Skilled Labor, Bill Gates Says..."
Amazon Leaks Apple Secrets
As Apple pursues legal remedies against online publishers that have published supposed trade secrets, it may have to contemplate suing its own sales partners to seal loose lips.
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The Bright Side Of The Road
Uncertainty seems to haunt IT professionals no matter how much they like their jobs. The fact is, regardless of how ubiquitous technology becomes, there's that nagging sense of not being quite fully appreciated and a gnawing fear that no matter how up-to-date your skills, you can be outsourced, laid off, or bypassed in the blink of an eye.
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You Call This A Dead-End Career?
This week, InformationWeek comes out with its annual National IT Salary Survey, and an interactive Salary Adviser based on the data. Through this week, we'll ask questions about the IT career path and highlight data that relates to it. Today: Is IT a career path you'd recommend to a teenager? The average computer-science or engineering grad will make $13,000 more than the average marketing major this year. Yet two-thirds of working IT pros in the InformationWeek survey don't consider it as promising a career path as it used to be. Why so glum?
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Is Gates Still Raining On Sun?
Maybe Bill Gates is God after all. This thought kept bouncing around my skull as I sipped a Heineken on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara, Calif., campus last Friday afternoon, watching as rain nearly ruined a quiet 10th birthday party for the Java programming language after a week of blue skies.
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The Flatness of Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times reporter Thomas L. Friedman is one of our more insightful commentators on the mid-East, globalization and international affairs. But it's also true that Friedman at times gets carried away with himself. In his new book, The World Is Flat, Friedman draws a bit too much meaning from East/West, new world/old world, hi tech/low tech juxtapositions that by now are commonplace.
For instance, Friedman seems almost dumbstruck by this banal utterance from Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." New York Press columnist Matt Taibbi's deconstruction of the Friedmanesque world view is biting but spot on and is hilarious to boot.
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Hey BlackBerry, Move Over! The Carriers Are Coming In
People on the go now have another alternative to the BlackBerry: A new push E-mail service from Vodafone. Visto Corp. said today that it has extended its push E-mail platform to Vodafone, and this could mean that mobile E-mail is shifting from a BlackBerry-dominated niche market made up of enterprise users to a more mass-market adoption.
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AMD's Dual-Core Innovates; Intel Makes Money
With Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s formal introduction of its dual-core Opteron processor on Thursday, a new era in computing will officially begin. One has to wonder why Intel continues to lag behind its upstart competitor.
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Outsourcing Successes Rival Those Of Marriage
Companies don't outsource core competencies. It's a concept carved in stone. But exactly what is or isn't a core competency? You might be surprised that routine processes commonly outsourced might be core to a company's bottom line. Take, for instance, accounts payable.
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Who Knew Shoe Shopping Could Lead To This?
As I sit here admiring my Lizsport slip-ons--so stylish and yet so comfortable--and contemplate my Christmas season purchase of black, knee-high boots--so stylish but not quite so comfortable--I can't help but wonder if the thrill of the purchase is worth the risk of personal data theft.
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IT Lives In The Past
Oracle this morning took a break from buying companies just long enough to talk about how all of its recently acquired software is supposed to work together. In the process, one Oracle executive hit on a major challenge for the company: IT people don’t like to upgrade software unless there’s a really good reason.
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IBM Needs A Shakeup
In the wake of a tepid first quarter, IBM officials say a "sizeable restructuring" is imminent at the company. Given its recent string of underwhelming financial reports, nothing less would seem in order.
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Government, Not Vendors, Must Lead In Securing Federal IT
No doubt the IT security industry has a lot of knowledge to share with the federal government to help secure government IT systems and Web sites. With near-failure grades on IT security scorecards, the feds need the assistance.
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Kerry's Latest Benedict Arnold is Heinz
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry vilified corporate heads who presided over the outsourcing of jobs overseas as "Benedict Arnold CEOs." Kerry can now add another industry chieftain to his list of those he considers to be national traitors: William R. Johnson, president, CEO, and chairman of H.J. Heinz Company—the multi-billion dollar food empire founded by Teresa Heinz Kerry's late, former father-in-law.
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America Is Losing Broadband War, And It Will Cost Us Billions
Broadband deployment serves as a barometer of economic strength in this age when the Internet promotes globalization, and measuring deployment of the technology in the United States suggests we're losing the war to Japan and other Asian nations.
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Siebel Is Making Me Crazy
If you juxtaposed the surprise firing of Siebel CEO Mike Lawrie against the cover story I wrote about Siebel a couple of weeks ago, you might come away with the impression that I--and thus InformationWeek--was duped. It would be a fair conclusion, I guess, but I want to explain why it may not be an accurate one.
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Google Launches Video Service
Google Inc. yesterday said it had begun accepting digital video files of any length for its Video Upload Program. Eventually, Internet users will be able to preview, play, and purchase video content through Google Video, the company’s video search service, which debuted in January.
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Siebel and The Enterprise Software Problem
The ouster (or "resignation by mutual agreement") of Siebel's briefly tenured CEO today puts an exclamation point on one of my key takeaways from this year's InformationWeek Spring Conference: the continuing, astronomical costs of enterprise software deployments and the pain they can cause.
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Not Again! Personal Data Compromised
Here's hoping that you don't hear from LexisNexis soon. If so, it's likely to be bad news.
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Another Casualty For Homeland Security
Nowhere has the government's struggle to keep the country safe while at the same time preserving individual liberties been more pronounced than at the Transportation Security Administration. On 9/11 air travel proved to be the weakest link in national security, and a lot of money and effort has since been spent to correct this. Now TSA, which launched in 2002 with ambitious and uncompromising goals of using technology and manpower to keep the airways from again being used as instruments of terrorism, is shriveling. This isn't necessarily a good thing, despite the controversy surrounding its No-Fly list and Secure Flight initiative.
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The Results Are In: In-Flight Cell-Phone Use Gets A Thumbs Down
My faith in humanity has been restored: You, our devoted readers, appear to be in widespread agreement that cell-phone use on airplanes is a bad idea. I'm so relieved. Part of me was afraid that business travelers felt naked without those extra hours of cell-phone access. But lo and behold, you share my appreciation of the one place where we can feel safe from the communications rat race, and it appears you'd like to preserve that isolated buffer zone--so much so that a few of you offered to give up Internet access if it would keep cell phones quiet during flights.
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Trading Places
The Securities and Exchange Commission gave its blessing this week to the New York Stock Exchange’s floor-based trading model. It voted to preserve the so-called trade-through rule, which prohibits an exchange from bypassing, or trading through, a better price offered by a competing exchange.
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Help Wanted (And Needed) For IT's Toughest Job
What’s the most grueling job in IT? My vote goes to CIO of Homeland Security. And the job is open as Steve Cooper revealed Wednesday that he's resigning as the department's first CIO.
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Apple Chip Deal Hints At New Device
SiliconValleyWatcher yesterday reported that Apple Computer has contracted to use multimedia chips from UK-based Alphamosaic in a future mobile device.
Alphamosaic was acquired by chipmaker Broadcom Corp. in September. The release announcing the transaction describes Alphamosaic's VC02 chip, which sounds like just the right thing to power a Wi-Fi-capable video- or game-oriented iPod.
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Cell-Phone Use On Airplanes? Beware Of What We Wish For
Most business travelers associate air travel with a lot of negative imagery--discomfort, stress, time away from family, and hunger come to mind--but airplanes also are a last bastion of an increasingly elusive concept: downtime. Now it looks like the cabin is going to get a lot noisier, and much sooner than many of us had expected.
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Happy Days Are Here Again For Many IT Pros
All IT job categories--from the CIO to the computer-support specialist--have rebounded to varying degrees from the employment slump that hit the profession a few years back.
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Google Spends On IT
Google is upping its IT ante. In its latest financial filing, the company anticipates it will "spend over $500 million on property and equipment, including information technology infrastructure, to manage [its] operations during 2005," assuming suitable property and equipment are available.
That's significantly more than the $176.8 million the company spent on capital expenditures in 2003 and the $319.0 million it spent in 2004.
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XP SP2: What Are You Waiting For?
An independent research firm has found a low percentage of corporate customers have made the move to Microsoft's Windows XP SP2 update.
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The Travel Industry's Distribution Conundrum
As the travel industry's big distribution systems grapple with emerging competition from a growing lineup of new entrants to the market, it looks more and more like they're facing a threat similar to the one low-cost carriers have posed to the nation's legacy airlines: a generation of upstarts attempting to turn an industry on its head.
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HP, GE, Metrics, And Innovation
Is Hewlett-Packard trying to become GE, at the same time GE is acknowledging the limits of its metrics-driven approach when it comes to sparking innovation?
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