Ballmer throws cold water on notion of fresh Yahoo bid

Microsoft chief executive Ballmer has rejected the notion of its return with a fresh offer for all of Yahoo takeover.

Ballmer stated that Microsoft was done with acquisition discussions and sarcastically remarked that in spite of making his stand very clear on several occasions, some people were trying to remain confused. He said that Microsoft had done its best and has moved on.

Ballmer was addressing the annual meeting of company’s shareholders in Washington, near to its Redmond headquarters. His address was relayed live via Webcast. Ballmer did not refer to Yahoo in his prepared address, but spoke only while replying to the first question from a shareholder.

There was speculation in the industry after Yahoo announced that it was looking for a replacement of chief executive Jerry Yang, who has decided to step down as soon as a new chief was hired.

Yahoo’s shares jumped 16% following news about Yang’s resignation but plummeted 15% to $9.97 (£6.60) a day after, in response to Ballmer’s remarks.

While rejecting the notion about Yahoo bid, Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft’s search partnership was still an interesting possibility, but no active discussion was currently on, although Microsoft was very open to it.

Novell releases Group Wise collaboration software

A new version of Group Wise collaboration software, an alternative to Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook suite, has been released by Novell.

Group Wise 8 was available in beta form for the last several months. It comes in Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and web versions. Novell is claiming that the total cost of ownership of its software is lower than that of Microsoft.

Suites of Group Wise 8’s instant-messaging software, calendar and email are on par with Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook and IBM’s Lotus/Domino.

Microsoft has also launched Exchange as part of its online hosted service. This has set the stage for another competition among collaboration products.

Novell stated that new software provides features like blogs and RSS feed. It has capability to utilise wikis and has its dashboard in mashup-style. Novell also claimed that the software supports Blackberry, iPhone and Palm mobile platforms. Its calendaring system makes specific data publicly available.

The Group Wise collaboration has numerous contact-management features such as associating geographical maps to contacts. This would assist third party contractors to work closely with internal staff of the company.

An innovative feature of Group Wise software is that it supports threaded email which allows reading of conversations as discussions. Novell has not yet declared software’s price for the UK market.

BT’s broadband rollout plan faces no financial risks

BT has assured its shareholders that the prevailing economic situation was posing no risk to its rollout plan of next-generation broadband across the UK. The fibre-rollout is reported to be on track despite financial upheaval.

BT had announced plans to invest £1.5bn in up-gradation of its network to provide optical fibre to 10 million UK homes by 2012.

Some shareholders had expressed apprehensions about the feasibility of plans to chief executive Ian Livingston and wanted BT to keep hold of its cash.

BT’s spokesman explained that the recession did not pose any risk to the project and its investment decision was not affected by anything at this juncture. But he admitted that it would be wrong to presume that recession would have no effect on project.

If construction plans of offices and homes across the UK were put on hold or scrapped, it would result in reduction of the number of homes that would be covered in the 2012 rollout.

At the time of project announcement, BT had urged Ofcom to amend regulations to facilitate making return on its investment.

The spokesman informed that negotiations between Ofcom and BT over this issue were in progress.

Ian Fogg, analyst at Forrester Research, suggested that BT should stick to its plan in order to reap benefits ahead of its competitors. He emphasised that rollout of super-speed broadband was still very important for the UK and BT in spite of economic downturn.

Microsoft to explain innovations in Visual Studio and .NET 4.0

Microsoft has selected some of its key executives to explain innovations it planned incorporating in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio. The move is part of an action plan evolved in the recently organised TechEd developer and PDC events.

Code-named as “Rosario”, Microsoft’s next version of Visual Studio is being promoted as a tool set which will raise analysis of application development process to new levels.

The company is committed to democratise application lifecycle management process. It is working on product enhancement which would meet software development requirements arising from cloud computing, virtualisation and parallelism trends.

Delegates visiting the UK to explain about forthcoming tools included Jason Zander, GM for Visual Studio and Matt Carter, Group Product Manager.

Shedding light on Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), Carter stated that it is strongly focussed on providing insight, in terms of function and structure of code, of the development process. Microsoft is ensuring to make it easier for building web applications. It is also aimed at encouraging departmental business applications development that makes use of Office UI. Microsoft is also looking forward to make development of SharePoint feel like development of Visual Studio to improve usability.

Carter disclosed that Microsoft wants to reach out to those C++ developers who have made big investment on lines of C++ code, so that they could carry those into the Visual Studio environment.

Adobe responds to demands of open-source users for 64-bit Flash

Adobe ultimately bowed to the demands of open source users and announced the release of an alpha version of Flash Player technology for the 64-bit Linux software.

In comparison with Mac OSX or Windows, Linux moved much faster in supporting 64-bit processors. Technically savvy users were able to switch over to Linux easily due to its compile-your-own-software feature and developer-friendliness. But the switch has one limitation; people can make use of only 32-bit flash thereby restricting use of only 32-bit version of Firefox.

The software would be released at Adobe Max 2008 conference, to be held at San Francisco. The 64-bit support would be extended to other operating systems at later date, but Linux users, who were most vocal in their demand, would get it first, Adobe declared.

Adobe stated that this release was its first step in making Flash Player native 64-bit for all platforms. Linux was chosen as the initial platform due to numerous requests on issue-management, Flash Player bugs and also due to reasons that Linux, as a practice, was not being shipped with a 32-bit browser. The release has now made Flash Player 10 a full native participant in 64-bit distribution.

Adobe declared its commitment to bring native 64-bit flash Player to Mac and Windows in future releases.

AMD’s quad-core Opteron processor ‘Shanghai’ launched

The chip maker, AMD, has announced the launch of their latest processor code-named ‘Shanghai’ on Thursday.

The 45nm (nanometre) server processor’s improved performance and enhanced power efficiency would serve to re-establish AMD’s competitiveness.

Deviating from its past processor launches, AMD highlighted improved power consumption more than faster performance. Improvements include enhancement of raw performance from 2MB on 65nm processor to 6MB of L3 cache. The clock range has also been improved from 2.0GHz-2.54GHz to 2.3GHz-2.7GHz, while the power envelope has been maintained below 100W

According to General Manager Emilo Ghilardi, Shanghai was the best processor in terms of performance, power consumption and cost. He added that it was not just performance anymore but performance per watt per dollar.

Along with increasing emphasis on energy efficiency, the IT market was also placing emphasis on migration from less efficient old systems to more efficient newer systems. AMD organised a demonstration of live migration at the launch of Shanghai.

Lesilie Sobon, Vice President AMD Marketing, believes that customers expect faster and easier migration. He claimed that Shanghai was seamless and quick migration.

According to Sobon, power saving was 35% at idle and 15-20% when working. The company is confident of getting an edge over competitors’ superior virtualisation with better memory controller performance and quick switching between virtual machines.

Employer inflexibility forcing women to quit IT jobs

Inflexibility on the part of employers is compelling thousands of women employees to quit their jobs, according to a report by the British Computer Society (BCS).

BCS revealed that during past 6 years to 2007, more than 37,000 female computing professionals had to leave the IT industry due to a lack of flexibility shown by the employers in granting breaks to women employees to take care of their ailing parents or for raising a family or travel abroad.

According to IT-sector Skills Council UK, the strength of female employees which was 229,440 – almost 33% of the UK’s computing professionals in 2001, fell by 6% to 192,580 in 2007.

The women employee number fell in spite of increase in strength of professionals’ strength from 989,120 to above one million in the UK’s IT industry.

According to BCS, it would take long to regain lost pool of female IT talent to overcome IT-skills crisis in the UK.

According to Dr. Jan Peters, Manager BCS Womens’ Forum, employers needed to show more flexibility, particularly for women employees, in granting career breaks to carry out their important and essential personal activities.

Very thin presence of female employees in the IT teams could hamper ability of companies in securing public-sector contracts which stipulate very strict balance of gender in employee strength.

iPhone 3G widens O2 UK customer base

The launch of iPhone 3G has helped O2 UK add three-and-half times more mobile customers to its base in third quarter, repeating its last year performance in the same quarter.

Financial results published by Telefonica, the Spanish parent of mobile operator, described O2 UK’s performance as best-ever third quarter in 2008.

O2 UK now has 19.1 million strong customer base which is 6.6% more than it was in third quarter of 2007. It is also the largest-ever customer base in the UK.

According to Telefonica’s statement, the biggest contributor to O2 UK’s growth was its UK exclusivity on the iPhone 3G handset and O2’s ‘Simplicity’ pre-pay tariffs. The statement also pointed out that O2 UK’s regional sales structure was one more factor which helped in achieving impressive performance in the small-business market.

The financial results also indicated that fewer customers (1.3%) left O2 UK in 3rd quarter of 2008 than in the same quarter in 2007 (1.75%).

Though average revenue per user (ARPU) registered a fall, total ARPU remained unchanged since O2’s data ARPU continued to grow.

Data ARPU was up 8.9% year-on-year due to significant rise in mobile internet usage. Revenues from Non-SMS data jumped by 61.1% on a year-on-year basis.

By the end of third quarter, O2 UK had 267,090 DSL broadband customers.

Nokia predicts weaker world market for mobile phones

Nokia is predicting bigger downturn in worldwide mobile phone market than it predicted in the fourth quarter and was expecting further fall in 2009.

Nokia is forecasting sale of 1.24 billion phones worldwide, which was previously estimated to be 1.26 billion. It said that hand set market and overall telecom equipment sales were expected to go down next year.

Nokia’s shares fell 7% to 9.56 euros, lowest since August 2004. According to Global Crown Capitals’ analyst Tero Kuittinen, this is a warning which has coincided with marked deterioration in the demand for consumer electronics.

Nokia, in its statement, claimed that slowdown in global economy accompanied by the currency volatility contributed to sharp decline in global consumer spending. The euro zone is now under recession and the economic growth has sharply slowed down around the world.

According to Nokia’s estimates, mobile device volumes of the industry for the fourth quarter would be 330 million, much below 346 million market forecast reported in Reuters’ poll this month.

The world’s leading phone maker is however expecting that its market share would remain at the same level in the fourth quarter or go marginally up compared with third quarter, but felt that sales and profitability are likely to suffer.

Qualcomm develops alternative to Windows-based PCs

Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm announced development of a low-cost computing platform, called Kayak, to serve as an alternative to Windows-based PCs in those parts of the world which do not have access to traditional broadband connections.

The Qualcomm’s new platform design is based on its dual-core MSM7 series chipsets which could also include Snapdragon chipsets that offer CDMA-based 3G and GSM-based technologies.

Qualcomm is confident of filling a niche between smartphones and Windows-based PCs through Kayak platform for providing internet-enabled devices to the markets in developing countries where laptops or PCs are too expensive. In this region people are unable to access internet due to unavailability of traditional broadband connections.

However, 3G networks, widely deployed in most regions of the world, are enabling people to access internet through 3G-enabled smartphones. But people experience inconvenience due to small sized screens and keypads and inadequate computing power supply for engaging the internet fully. This is where Kayak could prove to be a better alternative.

Devices that make use of the Kayak platform could be plugged into a computer monitor or TVs. Users will be able to play 3D games or music files and use keyboard and mouse.

According to Luis Pineda, vice president at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, the Kayak PC alternative demonstrated how Qualcomm was leveraging, for the first time, cloud computing over broadband networks, thereby unifying new regions into the global online community.

Qualcomm will be making a reference design, instead of producing Kayak computing devices itself. The recommended software specifications would be furnished to the device manufacturers for designing their own devices using Kayak specifications.

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