Despite Sun Microsystems Inc’s early lead in the Internet server business, Electronic Data Systems Corp reckons that Silicon Graphics Inc has the overall edge, and the General Motors Corp company agreed to form a strategic alliance in which it will use Silicon Graphics’s WebForce hardware and software to help other companies develop their presences on the World Wide Web.
Mercury One-2-One Ltd, the UK mobile telephone joint venture between Cable & Wireless Plc and US West Inc, is committing a further ú235m to building its digital network, bringing total expenditure up to ú895m and ensuring national coverage – defined as coverage of 90% of the population – by the end of 1997 – it is currently available only to 30% but aims for 40% by year-end and 65% by end-1996; the new money is to build out the One-2-One network along the south coast, Midlands and north west; it had around 260,000 customers at end-March, which it says is equivalent to 6.5% of the total market.
Big beneficiary of the expansion is L M Ericsson AB, which announced ú350m of business with Mercury One-2-One Ltd: the sum is higher than the total figure for new spending given by One-2-One because the Swede had not announced ú115m of work in hand to expand existing sites; the new Ericsson business with Mercury will also include the supply of its PH337 mobile handsets, which will be sold under the Mercury brand name, Ericsson said.
Auspex Systems Inc, Santa Clara, California has said that it will launch its Escala-based server in the middle of next year even though the project to integrate Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s Escala symmetric multiprocessing PowerPC AIX servers with its own Functional Multiprocessing architecture has only just started – Auspex says the project will be handled in the main by Bull, which in return would be given access to RIOS 2, the second implementation of the network servers it had produced for IBM Corp, which subsquently abandoned them.
Western Digital Corp says it is considering building two new plants in Singapore: commenting on a local newspaper report, it told Reuters that plans are under way to build the group’s very first high-end disk drive plant and it is also looking to set up a second disk media plant to meet growing demand; the firm’s existing platters plant is up in Santa Clara, California.
Mitsubishi Electric Corp will set up a 64M-bit dynamic random access memory production plant in in Saijo, in the southern Japan prefecture of Ehime, at a cost of about $1,175m: Mitsubishi will start building production lines for the next-generation memory chips in fiscal 1997-98 starting April 1997.
Commenting on its figures (page seven) Fremont, California-based Micronics Computers Inc said otherwise strong third-quarter results were offset by the effects of Osborne Computers Australia’s bankruptcy: the company wrote off its accounts receivable from Osborne, via a charge included in general and administrative expenses, but it is optimistic that Gateway 2000 Inc’s announcement that has now bought Osborne will benefit the company by ensuring its presence in the Australian market, and expanding its relationship with Gateway.
Audre Recognition Systems Inc, San Diego is in deep trouble: its auditors, Coopers & Lybrand LLP, have resigned because of what it says is its impaired ability to rely on management’s representations, and Audre said it may declare bankrupcy if it is unable to appeal an expected $11m litigation judgement against it in the California court of appeal later this month; Audre said that while it had no disagreements with Coopers & Lybrand, the auditor resigned, citing issues related to an interested party loan, funded and repaid in fiscal year end April 30 1994; it said its opinions with respect to the comp any’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal 1992, 1993 and 1994 should not be relied on and withdrew its consents related to their use – and will not issue an opinion for 1995; the American Stock Exchange has informed the company that it w
ill delist its stock indefinitely because of the auditors’ actions and because it does not satisfy all the financial guidelines for continued listing; Audre stands for Automatic Digitising and Recognition, designs, develops and markets proprietary systems to convert engineering drawings, technical publications and maps to machine-readable formats.
Sanyo Electric Co has revised upward its plans for investing in semiconductor production in the current fiscal year ending in March to $765m from $680m: the bulk of the increase, 70%, is for Flash memory and the rest for MOS logic.
Sybase Inc was hit by the most embarrassing and farcical sequence of circumstances on Wednesday, which started with a hoax that had trading in the shares erroneously suspended and ended with the shares soaring on false takeover speculation: the suspension was at the request of a hoaxer claiming to be the company’s chief financial officer, and was pending an announcement but the effect was for some traders to leap to the false conclusion that IBM Corp’s plans to announce a major partnership with a networking or a telecommunications firm referred not, as the better informed knew, to the alliance with Stet, but to a fictitious takeover of Sybase; the shares jumped 10% when trading was resumed.
AST Research Inc says it shipped 1.503m units during the latest fiscal year, including 1.285m desktops and 218,000 notebooks; it shipped 396,000 units during the latest fourth quarter, a 14% increase over the year-ago quarter; manufacturing, new product development and component constraints were key issues addressed during the first three quarters of the latest fiscal year, with lower-than-expected domestic demand and industry pricing pressures experienced during the latest fourth quarter; Samsung Electronics Co has now completed buying its 40% AST stake.
Gateway 2000 Inc, North Sioux City, South Dakota (no it’s not South Sioux City, North Dakota) completed the acquisition of the business and assets of Osborne Computer Corp of Sydney: the newly created company will be called Osborne Gateway 2000 Pty Ltd and is 20% owned by Micronics Computers Inc: Osborne customers who had prepaid with cash but not yet received their computers were faced with the possible loss of the majority of their money but Gateway has made provision to ensure that these customers will receive their systems by Christmas; Osborne Gateway was not required to uphold past warranty obligations, but the company set new policies to honour some previous obligations, and Osborne Gateway will begin a new three-year limited parts warranty and, in some geographies one-year on-site service for the repair of Osborne computer systems; for previous customers, the warranty will run retroactively to the day that the product was purchased.
IBM Corp’s 2Gb and 4Gb drives have been hit by an outbreak of stiction, heads welding themselves to the platters, says Infoworld columnist Robert Cringely: he talks about ones in personal computers, but the same drives go into Ramac, AS/400 and RS/6000; preventative is never to switch off, otherwise IBM recommends removing the drive and jerking it violently to free the heads.
