There was a growing feeling on Friday that Granada Group Plc and Amdahl Corp would shortly announce agreement for Amdahl, which needs new businesses to fill the hole in its business left by the fading of the mainframe, to buy Granada Computer Services, although the talks could still break down over issues of asset and contract valuation.
Internet plays continued to trade under pressure on Friday following Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates’s comments on the network: Microsoft shares stock topped the Nasdaq actives list and rose $2.125 to $92.625 as Netscape Communications Corp fell $7.50 to $125; UUNet Technologies Inc lost $3.75 to $55.
The trouble with the Internet’s World Wide Web is that if the item you want is at all interesting, even if you have an ISDN line, it comes to your machine at the pace of snail mail – and the big US cable television operators with their broadband networks are seeing this as their biggest opportunity in years, the Associated Press reports: the same opportunity is clearly open to the UK cable operators and could transform their prospects; in the US, Tele-Communications Inc, Comcast Corp and Cablevision Systems Corp will all have on-line access in a few cities next year – not good news for the phone companies that will have to invest heavily to upgrade their networks.
British Telecommunications Plc has joined the ranks of UK companies setting up European works councils including its British workforce: the first meeting of the council, which will give workers a say on a range of company matters from job prospects to sales figures, should take place in mid-1996 it declared.
Direct computer supplier Time Computer Systems Ltd, Burnley, Lancashire, has withdrawn sales of all-in-one PCTV models in spite of a running a large national press and advertising campaign to promote its combined personal computer and television range, because sales are failing to live up to its expectations: instead it is promoting personal computers with full multimedia capability and optional tuner boards; it offers a 75MHz Pentium multimedia tower system with 850Mb hard disk and 8Mb RAM for ú830 with a PCTV board for an extra ú160; the company says the market is not ready for mass volume PCTV sales, but if it sees an increase in people wanting the PCTV add-on, it may reconsider selling the PCTV models.
Netscape Communications Corp has chosen ICL Plc as its first Northern European systems integrator, as part of its Applications Integrators Programme, and said that the agreement should broaden acceptance of the Internet as a commercial vehicle: Netscape offers a range of corporate Internet applications including Netscape Community System, Merchant System, Publishing System, and IStore for on-line marketing and credit card transactions aimed at a wide range of companies wanting to trade over the Internet; it says that these corporate systems require implementation and consultancy, and says ICL has the resources to support its products.
NEC Corp says it has perfected the process technologies crucial to making Gigabit-class dynamic random access memory chips, and it expects to have 1G-bit samples in 1998.
The UK Office of Telecommunications had to announce on Friday that its decision on the level of interim access charges made by British Telecommunications Plc on other carriers had been delayed after disagreements with the company: BT has disputed certain matters including in particular Oftel’s power to exclude significant amounts of costs from the calculation of the charges, said telecommunications director general Don Cruickshank; he thought rival operators’ interconnect charges should not have to help pay for British Telecom’s redundancy costs, vacant accommodation, chairman’s office and flack.
De La Rue Plc is to buy the cash-handling, distribution and service business of Ensec SA of Brazil for $3m – $2m cash and a 10% stake in the UK company’s Brazilian subsidiary, De La Rue Investimentos SA.
Westinghouse Electric Corp plans to sell the defence-related part of its Electronic Systems unit and divest another smaller business for about $3,400m to pay down a substantial portion of the debt associated with its $5,400m acquisition of CBS Inc: General Motors Corp’s Hughes Electronics Corp declined to say whether it is interested in acquiring the defence businesses, but admitted that there are many synergies between their two businesses.
General Electric Co Inc’s NBC is negotiating for Microsoft Corp to become an equity partner in the 24-hour television news channel it is to launch, Dow Jones & Co says.
Digital Equipment Corp and the Plymouth, Massachusetts-based Kao Infosystems Co unit of the Japanese chemicals major, have joined forces to provide software publishers with software duplication and packaging services: the alliance will combine Kao’s duplication and logistics with DEC’s software publishing arm.
Sony Computer Entertainment UK Ltd says retail sales of its PlayStation CD-ROM video games machine, will reach 130,000 units before Christmas; it’s target had been 100,000.
The Indian government will hold back licences for basic telecommunications services involving Bezeq Israel and Thailand’s Shinwatra International Public Corp Ltd after the opposition accused it of bias in deciding the tenders, a government minister told parliament: it was responding to opposition charges that it had wrongly qualified the consortia for licences for basic telephone services in the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi by failing tp check their credentials; the government insisted the Bezeq consortium’s net worth was well above the required level and no exceptional treatment had been extended; the opposition also objected to the two choosing areas to operate, but the government said similar choices were given when cellular telephone licences were granted.
Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corp has now completed its acquisition of IBM Corp’s key Escon OEM parts supplier McData Corp: the deal values McData at about $234m.
Plenty of material for the conspiracy theorists arising from Microsoft Corp’s all-day Internet extravaganza last Thursday: attendees at the UK bounce of the event were told that no written material would be handed out because the releases and speeches were all on the Web, so everyone went back to the office and pointed their Netscape Communications Corp Navigator at Bill Gates’s speech, and users of a 1.X release received a pleasantly garbled version in which every line ran off the page, and sundry lines were over-written, users of the 2.0 beta release were slapped in the face by an error message; Microsoft had helpfully handed out disks of its own Internet Explorer at the event, and those that loaded this found that when they clicked on the Gates speech, it came down beautifully formatted; they then discovered that they had unwittingly brought an insidious cuckoo into the nest because as Explorer installs, although it doesn’t go quite so far as to declare itself your preferred browser, if you ask to look at any of the Web pages stored on your disk, you find that you’re looking at them with Explorer rather than Navigator or any other browser…
