Hewlett-Packard GmbH will invest around $50m in a third computer assembly plant in Herrenberg, Southern Germany, creating about 100 new jobs and employing some 450 people in total: its strategy is to keep critical assembly and distribution together in central Europe, and the new plant is close to its existing Bblingen and Schwieberdingen ones; it will make workstations and business servers and is to be fully operational by June 1997.
Microsoft Corp was holding a day-long session on its Internet plans yesterday and up first, Oracle Corp said it was collaborating with Microsoft on Internet development and publishing technologies for creating stronger and more active Web content: the two are cross-licensing technology to deliver standard scripting and programming features.
Separately, Microsoft Corp said Spyglass Inc is supporting its Windows NT-based Internet server.
And Microsoft Corp is developing Active Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or ActiveVRML, to bring interactive three-dimensional multimedia animation to the Internet.
Novell Inc yesterday completed the sale of its UnixWare business to Santa Cruz Operation Inc for about 6.1m Santa Cruz shares, a 17% stake, plus a revenue stream from Santa Cruz based on revenue performance of the UnixWare business to a maximum of $84m by the year 2002.
Nashua Corp, Nashua, New Hampshire plans to sell its Tape Products Division, part of its $320m Commercial Products Group, but did not say if it has yet chosen a buyer.
ICL Plc reports a contract worth over ú20m for operational services from the UK Department of Health.
The supply of sand may seem to be inexhaustible, but it does have to be processed into silicon ingots, and a shortage of polysilicon is expected to hit the industry by the middle or end of 1996, Dataquest said: the shortage is expected to last nine to 10 months, but should end with the addition of polysilicon market capacity in 1997.
Apple Computer Inc is estimated to have 20% of the World Wide Web server market, putting the company second only to Sun Microsystems Inc.
Seems Microsoft Corp is now characterising the Microsoft Network as its Internet service provider…
Just a pause… Internet counters opened broadly lower yesterday after a Smith Barney analyst issued a bearish report on the sector: shares in Netscape Communications Corp fell $11.50 to $149.75, the American Online Inc price was off $2.625 at $42; UUNet Technologies Inc fell $5.875 to $60.50, and Spyglass Inc fell $2.25 to $107.75.
London’s counterpart to Netscape Communications Corp is the rather more mature Psion Plc, whose shares have soared to 760 pence from a low of 244 pence just after the beginning of the year: they are also showing the kind of volatility that can be expected of Netscape shortly because 760 is a recent low – the shares have made an exponential curve since March to peak at 860 pence until this week, when NatWest Securities abruptly struck the company from the list of shares it trades, causing a 70 pence plunge to 765 pence on Wednesday – once again calling into question the merits of the market-maker system of share trading over the order-driven system that is used on most other stock exchanges worldwide.
British Telecommunications Plc reports that MCI Communications Corp has signed up the big Stentor alliance of Canadian telecommunications companies to distribute its Concert range of services in Canada.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, the flagship company of South Korea’s Samsung Group, says that its semiconductor sales in 1995 are expected to exceed $7,800m, against $5,200m in 1994: overall sales this year would be worth $21,070m, against $14,960m in 1994, it says.
Electronic design automation company Cadence Design Systems Inc is suing Avant! Corp, formed from the merger of ArcSys Inc, founded by three former Cadence engineers and Silicon Systems Inc, for software copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, conspiracy and other
illegalities: Cadence claims former ArcSys employees and a consultant stole source code from the company, and a customer of the two confirms that Avant!’s yet-to-be released ArcCell XO is almost identical to Cadence’s Cell3 Ensemble, including incorrect English grammar which appears in the two products; Cadence wants a court order blocking the sale of Avant!’s programs; Avant!’s share price fell 14% to $35.25 after a search warrant was served on the company.
One way and another, Data General Corp has done a pretty fantastic job of replacing what until the late 1980s generated its only revenue stream, proprietary minicomputers: the company has not been able to grow much in the transition, but it has not shrunk much in turnover terms either, although employment has plunged to 5,000 from 16,500 in 1985, and the Eclipse minis, which accounted for $900m of annual business, had shrunk to just $40m in the year to September 30, when according to the New York Times, CLARiiON disk arrays alone accounted for $170m, up from $50m the year before, the AViiONs brought in $400m, the maintenance arm $400m.
Four executives at the Alcatel CIT telecommunications equipment unit of Alcatel Alsthom SA are under formal investigation as part of the big probe into alleged overbilling.
Cisco Systems Inc has signed Wipro Infotech Ltd as India distributor.
Danish former state phone company Tele Danmark A/S said expansion in foreign markets was its main target, given the near saturation of the domestic market: it told the British Import Union that its aim is for international business to represent a major part in future; it listed central and eastern European and southeast Asian countries, notably China, as markets in which it is most interested; Tele Danmark is already involved in the cellular telephone sectors in Hungary, Lithuania and Ukraine, and is looking at the Czech Republic and Poland; the company is currently a member of a Singapore Telecom-Ameritech Corp consortium to bid for a 49% stake in state-owned Belgacom NV.
Trouble is, when the Financial Times runs a good story like the one this week about ICL Plc’s Design to Distribution wanting to expand into contract manufacturing in the US, likely via a joint venture, if it doesn’t appear in Computergram too, everyone thinks we missed it: we didn’t, though – it ran here in August (CI No 2,719).
We certainly think the Justice Department is barking up the wrong tree this time, and that the company didn’t do it on purpose – and unkind people are saying that of course Microsoft Corp didn’t intend that nobody else’s Internet access software would work once a Windows95 user had initiated Internet access via the built-in code – and if it had intended it, programmers that needed 16Mb in which to write a simple little desktop operating system would never have been able to make the trap work anyway, and it would have gone the way of all the other features that were intended to be in the first release of Windows95 and fell by the wayside.
