Memorex Telex NV has turned to the old enemy, IBM Corp for Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches, and the company will sell, install and support IBM’s full line of Campus Asynchronous Transfer products for customers integrating their SNA networks with Asynchronous Mode.
Redwood Shores, California-based handwriting recognition software specialist Communication Intelligence Corp hopes the problems of using computers with Chinese ideograms will give it a new lease on life: the company has won a renewal of its co-operative agreement with the US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards & Technology under the Advanced Technology Programme to continue research and development of handwriting recognition software for the Chinese language, which is worth $670,000 over one year; the US company already has a joint venture with the Ministry of Electronic Industries of Jiangsu province, Communication Intelligence Computer Corp Ltd, which is performing system integration services and will market the pen-based business computer and communications systems to Chinese business and government users, and the grant will help offset costs to complete advanced Chinese language user interface and handwriting recognition software.
Englewood, Colorado-based Tele-Communications Inc has bought 51% of Cablevision SA de Argentina, the biggest cable firm in Buenos Aires, on undisclosed terms; the deal gives it the option to go to 80%.
Etisalat, the public network operator in Abu Dhabi has awarded Alcatel Alsthom SA a contract worth the equivalent of $20m for a Groupe Speciale Mobile cellular network with capacity for 50,000 subscribers; Alcatel and Etisalat will jointly install the network, which is to go into service by mid-1995.
Amsterdam-registered SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV and Robert Bosch GmbH have signed a licensing agreement whereby SGS-Thomson grants Bosch the rights to develop and manufacture smart power semiconductor integrated circuits for its automotive components business from SGS-Thomson’s latest generation Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS process.
L M Ericsson Telephone AB says it has negotiated a contract worth about $133m to supply Argentina with mobile telephone equipment: the deal covers both the southern and northern parts of Argentina and areas outside Buenos Aires; Ericsson’s current 40% share of Argentina’s mobile phone market is expected to top 50% when the new agreement is signed by the end of May.
It’s amazing how eager experienced users are to get their hands on new releases of personal computer software when so many upgrades prove so frustrating and infuriating: once you get to MS-DOS 5, you find that the routines for the simple process of formatting a floppy disk drive have been refined to such an extent that most people find that when they think they’ve reformatted a disk, all the machine has done is run electronic fingers over the tracks and decided they seem to be all right, even though they are not; the most exasperating aspects of most software upgrades are the changes that have been made that second-guess what the user will want to do – in our experience almost always wrongly and stupidly – and the way things that require a single keystroke s uddenly need two or more so that you can reject options you never wanted to be offered in the first place – indeed what is so often so impressive is just how good the programmers that wrote the original version of the program were and how lousy all the ones that follow after are; on that basis we submit that anyone used to and reasonably satisfied with Windows 3.11 and tempted to migrate to Windows95 should lie in a darkened room until the temptation passes.
Fore Systems Inc is to incorporate the Intel Corp 80960 RISC in place of the Sparc in its ASX-200 Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch: the Intel chip is said to be less expensive, and will also offer the potential for higher performance, depending on switch configuration.
Sunnyvale, California-based automated software quality specialist Mercury In
teractive Corp is to acquire Blue Lagoon Software Inc, Tarzana, California developer of client-server debugging technology, in a $2m to $3m share exchange.
Compaq Computer Corp has a new target, which is to build on its leadership to the point where its market share is double that of its next nearest competitor, president and chief executive Eckhard Pfeiffer told the annual meeting: We haven’t put a specific year on it, Pfeiffer said afterwards, adding that the target will likely take more than two years to achieve.
Nynex Corp is licensing its speech-recognition software to Southwestern Bell Telephone Co, which wants it for its own voice-activated dialling service – Nynex and US West Inc already use the system in their own spoken dial systems, where the user pre-programs a central computer with voiceprints of numbers and then dials simply by speaking the desired number into the telephone.
Gupta Corp has opened an office with in Hong Kong with 12 staff, poached from Powersoft Hong Kong; it also established a Peking base.
All the stupid blunders made by the poeple running big companies – Burroughs Corp should never have bought Memorex Corp and should have married Xerox Corp, not Sperry Corp while Sperry would have done better selling out to NCR Corp, Digital Equipment Corp had it made in 1987 and frittered it all away by continuing to fight with the weapons of the 1970s war, IBM Corp need never have got into such an unholy mess if it hadn’t believed its own publicity about the mainframe – are made a little more comprehensible when you see the kind of business books people are writing – and managers are presumably trying to read – these days: some choice quotes from the recent crop culled by the International Herald Tribune include Differences in value creation insights and parenting characteristics are reflected in different criteria for heartland businesses; Leaders need to take their businesses ahead of prosumerism and the process-cost curve; and our favourite, Our idea is that, eventually, within any holon in the holon ic network, all support and management processes will be outsourced – explains it all, doesn’t it.
