Apple looks doomed to soldier on alone, we wrote in CI No 2,828) and now the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column seems to have come to the same conclusion – on Friday, in a piece tagged Apple Search for a Suitor May Go Unrequited, it revealed that as recently as two weeks ago, Apple Computer Inc was in discussions with Sun Microsystems Inc, saying that the talks ended in an apparent dispute over the price; the paper reckons that Apple also actually solicited a bid from Hewlett-Packard Co.
IBM Corp’s new chief financial officer Rick Thoman told analysts that the Personal Computer Co contributed the biggest improvement to the bottom line, saying it grew between 11% and 20%, and that costs on the product lines he reviewed are now in line with those of Compaq Computer Corp – but would not say whether it actually made a profit (so clearly it didn’t); I think the PC company should feel pretty good about its performance this year, Thoman said – and who was running the business for most of the period under review? – Thoman.
Rick Thoman also said IBM Corp is seeking acquisitions in the services area, and he is also looking for a software business that would be a piece of a solution, not just a stand-alone; he also said that IBM will continue to buy in shares.
And Rick Thoman confirmed that IBM Corp is looking at its options with regard to Prodigy Services Co.
C’est fait: Elektrowatt AG holds 95.46% of Landis & Gyr AG registered shares and 94.23% of the share warrants issued with a 2.0% bond as of the closing of the offer period.
Micron Technology Inc chairman Steve Appleton has resigned, leaving fans of the Boise chipmaker worried: analysts say he may have left in a dispute involving Micron’s capital investment strategy.
IBM Corp says it must hire 10,000 additional employees to staff its rapidly-growing services business.
MCI Communications Corp confirmed it will participate in the January 24 auction of the one available satellite television slot, saying it has filed an application with federal regulators: the long-distance phone company also said that it has an undertsanding with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Ltd over use of the licences being auctioned in the event MCI is the successful bidder.
The famous Frog Design Inc was apparently responsible for creating the prototype Network Computer that Oracle Corp’s Larry Ellison has been showing off in Japan: seems the company has come up with something it is calling Network Computer Operating System or NC-OS that will run on a family of Internet and World Wide Web devices ranging from television set-top boxes to video phones and pagers; although the initial iteration uses the ARM7500 RISC, and NC-OS appears to be based on Acorn Computer Group Pld’s RISC OS, it is being designed to be processor-independent and there will inter alia be a version for iAPX-86-based personal computers, with application portability.
Larry Ellison said in Japan that Oracle Corp plans to introduce the Oracle Network Computer around September, at a retail price of $495 for its desktop Oracle Network Computer, and $595 for a portable model; he also said that demand for Internet computers with simplified functions would outpace demand for conventional personal computers by the end of the century; Oracle is seeking a licensing agreement with about 20 computer manufacturers worldwide, several of them Japanese; the modem in the first version will run at 28.8Kbps, Oracle says.
One of the factors that makes IBM Corp’s sterling year-end figures look like a high water mark is the nascent – and largely unacknowledged recession on continental Europe, but while politicians led by Chanceller Kohl are mesmerised by unattainable convergence criteria and single currencies, those that have to operate in the real world are a lot less starry-eyed: Not only will growth not be enough to reduce unemployment, it will be so low that unemployment will continue to go up, declares Armin Sorg, senior director for economic policy at Siemens AG in Munich, who bemoans the fact that German factory wages are the highest in the world and that an engineer in Germany works a full three months a year less than does an engineer in the US.
Sun Microsystems Inc’s commission to NEC Corp to fabricate the MicroSparc III (CI No 2,829) – close to conclusion but not actually sealed yet – would be a pure foundry agreement placed with NEC because it has plenty of 0.35 micron technology: NEC would not get marketing or other rights, and there would be no co-development.
France is diverting the money raised by motorway tolls into a job creation scheme: it says that rather than fostering the automatic toll collection industry, most new motorway toll booths will be manned in an effort to create a few jobs.
Main shareholder and chairman of Greek telecomunications equipment manufacturer Intracom SA, Socrates Kokkalis excoriated the Kathimerini financial daily, saying I am surprised that a newspaper which is considered serious and responsible published in a blatantly inappropriate manner a correspondence from Germany alleging our company had dealings with East German secret services, Kokkalis told the paper.
Describing Prodigy Services Co as an ugly child – a 12-year-old, magnificently expensive underachiever – San Jose Mercury News staff writer David Plotnikoff forecasts that within six months, the Prodigy membership will be purchased at a bargain basement price by another on-line player and a forced migration to another service will ensue.
TeleWest Plc and Diamond Cable Ltd have each been awarded local delivery cable television franchises by the UK Independent Television Commission; both companies were sole bidders: TeleWest Southport won the licence for the Southport area with a cash bid of ú1,000 to supplement minimum percentages of revenue to be paid to the UK government, while Diamond Cable (Lincolnshire) Ltd won the licence for Lincolnshire and South Humberside, with a bid at ú50,315; licences are for 15 years.
Spanish cellular phone operator Airtel has cleared investments of $325m and increased its workforce by 500: Airtel, the first and only competitor to Telefonica Moviles SA in the Spanish digital cellular phone market, started up on October 3, sparking a price war that caused the price of the cheapest digital phone to fall 60%; it ended the year with around 15,000 subsrcibers compared with Telefonica Moviles’s 35,000 for its MoviStar service, launched in July 1995; AirTouch Communications Inc is the leading single shareholder in Airtel with 15.78%; the other shareholders include British Telecommunications Plc, and the Spanish banks, utilities and financial institutions.
Reviewing the dilatory way in which the AS/400 franchise is being dissipated (see page two), and the leisurely progress (one step forward, two steps back) of the PowerPC consortium towards what now looks like oblivion, the people that hand these things out have awarded IBM Corp a new theme song – We Have all the Time in the World: the song was a big hit, but not until Louis Armstrong had been dead some 15 years.
