News and Analysis to 10th June 2005
Steve Jobs goes for brain transplant
Apple’s CEO has surprised the market by announcing plans to
drop Apple’s use of IBM’s PowerPC chip in favour of Intel. This has drawn mixed
reactions from the Apple community, though the overall consensus is that Mr
Jobs can do no wrong, so it must be a good move. This opens up some interesting
possibilities: Apple’s OS X operating system becoming available on standard PCs
and/or OS X morphing into MS Windows. Most loathsome of all to the
hip/funksters that are Apple users, is that ‘industry’ will embrace them.
Though paying a premium for pastel shades may limit their use to reception
areas and other customer contact spaces.
Microsoft to squash Blackberry
Microsoft has enhanced its mobile operating system and
Exchange software to wirelessly push email to its users, having taken note of
the success achieved in this field by RIM with its ubiquitous Blackberry.
Naturally Microsoft wants to obliterate the market creator from the IT landscape.
RIM might consider making contact with Novell, Netscape and Lotus amongst
others, who will all be very familiar with the market-loss bereavement
counselling services industry.
Microsoft’s fine according to European Commission
The European Commission had taken a firm stance in respect
of Microsoft’s alleged monopolistic practices. The 500m euro fine was an
irritation to the software giant, but insisting that elements of Microsoft’s
intellectual property become ‘open source’ would have, I imagine, caused Bill
Gates to become apoplectic. The EC felt that Microsoft needed an incentive to
overcome it’s inertia in respect to this sanction, and so announced that from
the start of June, Microsoft would have to pay a fine of circa $5m per day
until it complied. Microsoft’s lawyers, experts in brinkmanship, have made a
proposal, which appears to broadly satisfy the EC. However the thorny issue of
open source appears to remain unaddressed.
Sun shadows Storagetek
Sun reinforced its ‘under the bonnet’ credentials by making
an offer to buy ‘tape to disk’ vendor Storagetek. Sun is looking to buy what is
a relatively well kept secret in the IT industry. Storagetek is cash rich, has
well engineered products and a mature path to market. Possibly with the storage
market heating up, Sun is concerned that if a rival such as HP were to acquire
Storagetek, then this would send Sun’s lack-lustre storage business into a
tailspin.
IBM tops database table
The battle for the top slot in the database revenue rankings
is usually a close run affair. IBM (£2.66bn) has pipped Oracle ($2.64bn) now
for the third year running according to Gartner, though statistically it might
be considered a draw. Oracle is currently growing faster than IBM so next year
might see a change at the top. Oracle dominates Unix. Microsoft and NCR were
the fastest growing database players. Sybase made the top five.
Europe flattened
According to Gartner, a slow economy in Western Europe,
which is negatively impacting business confidence, is flattening IT growth
curves in the region. Both Gartner and Ernst and Young expect the migration of
IT to offshore locations to continue. Gartner suggest that the question itself
is moving from ‘if’ to ‘when’.
