'Computers / Technology' Archive
The Mojave Desert is a barren and desolate place. Encompassing the iconic Death Valley in California and adjacent states, the High Desert has inspired generations of artists with its arid, unforgiving beauty, as expressed in U2’s classic 1987 album, The Joshua Tree, and many other works.
The word “Mojave” has lately come to be associated with a barren and desolate corporation from the rainy Pacific Northwest, however. Microsoft hired the advertising and branding firm Bradley and Montgomery to conduct consumer testing of a “new” computer operating system. The subjects were told the demonstration they witnessed was of an OS code-named “Mojave.” At the end of the demo, the subjects were told that “Mojave” actually is — wait for it — Windows Vista! Yes, Vista, the much-slagged iteration of Windows that first shipped 18 months ago and has underwhelmed PC users around the world.
Videos of the demos and reactions are posted at MojaveExperiment.com. All over the blogosphere, this attempt at redeeming the reputation of Vista has drawn widespread derision and scorn.
I’ve been using Windows Vista Home Basic on my personal notebook computer since early last year, and I’ll say I’m still generally happy with the operating system. Sometimes it seems like an overbearing spinster aunt, asking me if I really, truly want to visit that unfamiliar Web site, but you can disable such hurdles. My computing requirements are quite simple, however, and I haven’t had the unpleasant experience of trying to connect an old printer with my Vista-based PC or other horror stories.
At Hoover’s, we’re still using Windows XP Professional (and Internet Explorer 6!), and we don’t seem to have any immediate plans for big changes in our company IT infrastructure when it comes to operating systems and browsers. (A lot of people here use Firefox to take advantage of tabbed browsing and other useful features, things that are incorporated into IE7.)
Whether you think Vista is a blessing, a curse, or something in between, you’ve got to admit this is a curious way for a big corporation to market a controversial product.
Friday’s annual meeting of Yahoo! shareholders will be anticlimactic, thanks to a deal worked out last week between the company and activist investor Carl Icahn, who owns about 5% of Yahoo!’s shares.
Icahn called off his proxy challenge, striking a settlement agreement with Yahoo!’s board and management. Basically, one incumbent director will leave the board, the board will expand from nine to 11 seats, and two of the three vacant seats will be filled by Icahn and former AOL CEO Jon Miller, with Icahn to name a third director. (Please let it be Mark Cuban!)
Icahn briefly blogged on the settlement, which is so 21st century, of this aborted proxy battle.
What brought about this rapprochement? As others have noted, one event that may have tipped the balance and caused Icahn to seek a deal was the declaration by Legg Mason the week before that it planned to vote its shares in favor of the management nominees at the Yahoo! annual meeting. Bill Miller, the manager of Legg Mason’s flagship Value Trust fund, loudly criticized Yahoo!’s board and management for scaring off Microsoft, yet decided in the end to go with the devil he knew. Icahn reportedly saw Yahoo!’s institutional investors circling the wagons around the incumbent board and management and apparently decided against suffering a public defeat.
For their part, the Yahoos in Sunnyvale, California, knew they were about to report mediocre results from their second quarter, so they also had an impetus to come to an arrangement with the barbarians at their gate.
This sally by Icahn is looking like his crusade against Motorola — he buys a small but significant stake in the target company, blusters about the sins of the board and management, pulls together a proxy bid, and then calls it off in exchange for seats on the board for him and some cronies. It remains to be seen whether the Yahoo! episode will play out like Motorola did, with the CEO banished and the company broken up.
Meanwhile, the Evil Empire in Redmond, Washington — excuse me, I mean Microsoft — is officially washing its hands of any interest in all or part of Yahoo!, and turning to its own knitting to defeat Google. Knit one, Perl two? (A little coding humor.)
Yahoo!’s not out of the woods, with Congress scrutinizing its search advertising deal with Google and some shareholders still mad about losing out on $33 a share in cold, hard cash from Microsoft. (The stock closed Monday at $20 and change.) Not much yodeling going on at Yahoo! HQ these days.
Not me, buddy. I’m no gadget geek. My wireless phone is an aging Samsung A660. I’ve never owned an iPod, although I bought one for my daughter and I’m a power user of iTunes at home and at work.
Then again, Apple sold more than 1 million iPhones by Sunday, so lots of people obviously care about the new iPhone.
The iPhone 3G went on sale last Friday, and people in New York City were lining up a week in advance. Some of those folks, however, apparently were hippie farmers trying to make a point about organic food and technology.
A lot more people lined up just for the iPhones, including Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who spent hours at a mall in San Jose, California — not waiting in line, like most civilians, but lounging on the comfy furniture in the mall and then taking his place at the head of the line when the Apple store opened on Friday morning. Violence did not ensue, as Apple fanatics will countenance anything from the two creators of the Apple II personal computer. (To be fair, Woz later reported that he had permission in advance from the staff of the Apple store in question to sit on the chairs near the store entrance and then to be first in line, along with several friends, as the store opened.)
The big news about iPhone 3G launch day was all the trouble activating the newly purchased phones (not a surprising development, given that hundreds of thousands of iPhones were bought that day in Apple and AT&T stores) and the temporary “bricking” of existing iPhones as their owners installed the newest version of iTunes and downloaded the cool new iPhone applications from the App Store. Through the weekend, there were more than 10 million iPhone and iPod touch apps downloaded.
The iPhone 3G is a certified hit, and it may help boost sales for chip makers supplying semiconductors for the new smart phone. They include Broadcom, Infineon Technologies, Marvell Technology Group, Skyworks Solutions, and TriQuint Semiconductor.
The semiconductor industry — how’s it doing this year? Not bad, actually, if you’re not in the DRAM or flash memory device business.
In the Semiconductor Industry Association’s mid-year update, there was good news and bad news. You want the bad news first? OK, the bad news is the US-based trade group lowered its growth forecast for 2008, from 7.7% to 4.3%. The good news? Take out the memory products market, and the industry will grow 7.4% this year, according to the SIA.
IC Insights, a market research firm, also downgraded its forecast for 2008. It sees sales volume increasing by 7%, instead of an earlier estimate of 9%, and unit volume growing by 8%, rather than 11%.
It’s been a bummer of a year for chip makers that are heavily dependent on the DRAM or flash memory business. There still is tremendous oversupply in those markets, depressing memory prices. Qimonda (the memory products spinoff of Infineon Technologies) is suffering and cutting headcount, as is Spansion. Micron Technology is seeing tough times, too. Samsung Electronics, the world’s biggest supplier of memory devices, is a more diversified chip maker and not hurting as much. Most companies in the business are scrapping over market share.
What’s selling? Microprocessors, analog semiconductors, and logic devices, the SIA reported. Analog chips and MPUs each make up about 14% of the worldwide semiconductor market, and the SIA forecasts healthy growth for both segments in the next couple of years.
SIA president George Scalise said in a statement, “Sales of personal computers, the largest single market for semiconductors, continue to be strong, especially in emerging markets. Total unit sales of PCs are on pace to grow by 10% this year to around 300 million units. Cell phone unit shipments are expected to grow by about 12% to more than 1.3 billion units, with the largest growth coming from China, India, and other emerging markets.”
The SIA’s rosy take on the PC market is echoed by two market research firms, Gartner and IDC Research. Gartner recently bumped up its 2008 forecast for worldwide PC shipments, to 15.2% from an earlier forecast of 12.8% growth over 2007. IDC Research was a little less optimistic but nonetheless similarly inclined to see the glass filling with more water; it now calls for 12.5% growth in the PC market for 2008, up from a prior estimate of 10.9%.
And the trend is toward smaller, more portable computers. Laptops, notebooks, and smaller portables will increase sales by about 34% this year, according to IDC, while sales of desktop computers will grow only around 5%. The functionality of smart phones, principally the BlackBerry and the iPhone, will continue to increase to the point that there will be little difference in applications, price, and size between them and the smallest computers.
News item: Novellus Systems agreed to pay $168,000 to an African-American assembly technician who claimed he was fired after he repeatedly complained to management about a Vietnamese-American co-worker. The co-worker played rap music on the factory floor and rapped along with the music’s lyrics, which included language that the African-American employee considered racially offensive. Management apparently took no action on the issue, which led to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) suing the semiconductor production equipment manufacturer last September for racial harassment.
The company settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing and agreed to amend its anti-harassment policy to prohibit the playing of music with offensive lyrics, with specific examples to be provided in the policy.
Seems pretty cut-and-dried for a case in employment law — a colorful example, you could say. What the news coverage doesn’t tell, and it’s unlikely that Novellus will either, is exactly how the company’s managers treated this case. On the face of it, the case indicates managerial indifference and possibly incompetence — failures that cost Novellus $168,000. That’s not much money for a company that last year posted net income of $213.7 million on sales of $1.57 billion. Still, I bet that $168K is more than the salary of the manager who told the unhappy employee to “Just ignore him” or “Get over it.” And I bet that manager didn’t inform his or her bosses of the problem until the situation escalated, when HR and legal executives had to respond to inquiries from EEOC investigators. I bet that manager is now an ex-manager of Novellus Systems, so the company saved that person’s salary toward paying the judgment. Of course, the whole episode cost Novellus a lot more than $168,000, factoring in the legal fees, distraction of management time, and extra work for HR. Maybe a few people got fired as a result. So, there’s a ripple effect of consequences.
I feel personally disappointed in Novellus, because I’ve covered the company since its founding in 1984 and interviewed its senior executives on many occasions. Brad Mattson was among the founders of Novellus, and he went on to establish Mattson Technology and other firms. Bob Graham convinced his employer at the time, Applied Materials, to buy Novellus in 1986; the deal was called off, however, as a corporate turf war broke out. When management decided to go with Applied’s internally developed deposition system over the Novellus design, Graham quit the company and joined Novellus as its president and CEO. He retired in 1996 and died in 1998; his achievements are annually commemorated by the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International trade group with the Bob Graham Award, which goes to an executive who has shown distinctive marketing and sales acumen, something Graham had in abundance. Rick Hill, the current chairman and CEO of Novellus, is a tremendously talented executive whose experience was forged in the fires of Tektronix, the perpetually embattled instrument maker.
The resolution of this episode comes in an election year that features the first African-American presidential nominee of a major party. We’re going to have a national dialogue on the racist history of the US as a result, although many would prefer to look forward, rather than backward. Bigotry is being linguistically recast as “lower racial sensitivity,” a term that puts a genteel front on racial resentment and hatred. Maybe we should first lighten up on the language, which does carry emotional baggage. The comedian Mike Birbiglia jokes that only white people are allowed to call each other “crackers” — as in “Cracker, please!” or “Cracker what!?” A smile is a good place to start. Then, we can move on to the more important work of achieving mutual respect in the workplace, and everywhere else in the US.