There are some very unhappy computer dealers out there as IBM Corp holds a fire sale of 3390 disk drives from its lease portfolio ahead of the Ramac II roll-out: our US associate, Technology News of America, which on May 23 had a used 3390-3 A storing 22.7Gb pegged at $42,500 finds IBM is offering the thing to users at $22,700; a used 34Gb storing 34Gb that would have cost $62,000 on the used market a month ago is being offered by IBM at $34,000, a 15.1Gb 3390 A28 is $3,750 from IBM where it had been $6,750 in the market a month ago, and a 22.9Gb 3390 B2C is $5,700 from IBM, down from $9,750 if you bought one from a dealer in May.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd is responding to all the competitive activity in the games machine markets by slashing the price of its 3DO Co Real machine 33.5% to the equivalent of $350 in Japan: the reduction marks the start of a sales promotion to celebrate worldwide sales of game software for Real machines reaching 10m units.
You know that it is all going to end in tears, but the canny will make a lot of money in the meantime as the Internet bubble balloons and balloons: shares in Naperville, Illinois-based Spyglass Inc jumped $10.125 from its initial offering price to $27.125 on its first day of trading as a public company.
IBM Corp has tapped James Alic, chairman of Reed Exhibition Cos, a Stamford, Connecticut arm of Reed International Plc, to be its vice-president and controller, reporting to its finance chief, Jerome York.
Dataquest Inc forecasts that 100m personal computers will be shipped worldwide in 1999, up from 48m in 1994: in value, the market will soar to $185,000m by then, from $95,000m last year; Dataquest is going for 57m computers valued at $116,000m for the current year.
The Czech government has chosen the joint bid from Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV and the Swiss PTT to buy the 27% stake on offer in the telephone monopoly SPT Telcom as, and expects the final contract to be signed by the end of July: the consortium, called TelSource, bid $1,320m for the stake, but the final sum to be paid will be determined during the negotiations; Swiss Telecom and PTT Telecom Nederland are already involved in a telephone modernisation project in Hungary, but this project is much more limited than the Czech one.
Finnish telecommunications and electronics major Nokia Oy is following almost all the hardware manufacturers and almost none of the entertainment software providers in saying that it will support the new high-density multimedia Digital Video Disk format proposed by Sony Corp and Philips Electronics NV.
Siemens AG says it is planning to invest $1,000m in India over the next five years, concentrating on telecommunications and power generation and distribution equipment.
Malaysia’s national power company, Tenaga Nasional, is to join forces with Cellular Communications Network (Malaysia) Bhd and Malaysian Resources Corp Bhd to build a fibre optic network in Peninsular Malaysia: the three agreed to plan, develop, operate and maintain the fibre optic telecommunications network by stringing the cables between Tenaga’s electricity pylons.
The tall poppies don’t seem to last very long in the Rupert Murdoch empire, and Atari Corp, Sunnyvale has named Ted Hoff president of its North American operations, looking after the US, Canada and Mexico: Hoff was most recently senior vice-president and general manager of the Fox Interactive arm of News Corp Ltd’s Twentieth Century Fox.
Autodesk Inc is buying in 2.0m of its common shares on the open market – mainly to help offset the dilution to earnings per share caused by the issue of shares under its employee share ownership plans.
Xerox Corp introduced DocuWeb, a hardware-software combination for the higher education market designed to enable students to view and print specific digital documents via the World Wide Web: documents including course notes, reserved readings and out-of-print books now can be accessed electronically any time
from the Internet through a personal computer, and DocuWeb provides students with the ability to view and print documents on a college or university’s home page on the World Wide Web, Xerox noted.
AT&T Corp has won a contract to install 300,000 telephone lines in the central Philippines for Isla Communications Co Inc, an affiliate of Shinawatra Computer & Communication Public Co Ltd: AT&T will supply the telephone equipment for the central islands of Panay, Guimaras, Siquijor and Negros Occidental.
Malaysia’s Penang state is licking its wounds after a massive power failure over the weekend crippled its high-tech manufacturing centre: a fire disabled power cables on the bridge linking the Malaysian mainland with the tourist island, which is also home to the likes of Seagate Technology Corp, Motorola Inc, Intel Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, all of which will have lost production; Penang is home to 203 mostly high-tech factories, which employ more than 76,500 people; the national electricity company, Tenaga Nasional Bhd, says it has had to begin a load-shedding schedule under which factories will have to take turns operating for three days and shutting down for three days; first to react was Integrated Device Technology Inc, which packages its chips on Penang, and warns that its summer deliveries could be hit.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc later said the power cut in Penang affected its test and assembly plant but should only minimally impact revenues in the second quarter ending July 2; National Semiconductor Corp expects its operations in Penang to function at half normal capacity until July 2 and it agreed to the power sharing plan with other manufacturers; and Read-Rite Corp was able to reassure that its operations were unaffected by the cut – because they are on the mainland; a German team of engineers flew in on Monday to repair cables supplying power from the Malaysian mainland to the tourist and technology island and had repaired one by Tuesday night – We might be able to supply power to industry in five to six days, said Hans Ulrich Lengler, senior engineer of Kaiser Kabel AG, but it could take another nine to 10 days to restore power to the rest of the island; another team of engineers from Belgium is expected to arrive by Thursday to help with the repairs; Malaysia is the world’s largest chip packager.
Apple Computer Inc has a new release of its QuickTime for Windows multimedia software, and says that 2.1 will take full advantage of the latest 32-bit operating systems including Windows NT and Windows95.
Jeff Hosier to the rescue – his Xephon Plc Handbook of IBM Terminology can be relied upon in extremis when the bank for this spot unexpectedly turns out to be overdrawn: in the IBM Corp world, he says Point is usually used in the context of Point tools, which are tools supporting only a single point within a complex process, a term most commonly used by IBM in a derogatory way to refer to tools which support just one part of the the software development lifecycle, as opposed to AD/Cycle, which supports the whole life cycle (or at least it would if it worked).
