Another one bites the dust, and people are describing it unkindly as a bad case of Thoman poisoning: according to the Wall Street Journal, Robert O’Malley, general manager of IBM Corp’s desktop personal computer operations, quit last week under pressure, following the departure of the unit’s manufacturing chief, John McClelland, in January.
Compaq Computer Corp chief executive Eckhard Pfeiffer said his company had no plans to make clones of Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh – We see such a strong customer infrastructure today for the existing iAPX-86 architecture and that’s where we’re focusing our resources, Pfeiffer told Reuters after a news briefing in London.
Silicon Graphics Inc warned that it expects to take a one-time charge in its fiscal fourth quarter of about $25m to $35m to write off research and cover other costs associated with its two software acquisitions (see front): it also said it expects the new software subsidiary to generate over $100m in revenues for its fiscal 1996.
Milford, Connecticut-based Executone Information Systems Inc reports that it is currently in very preliminary discussions about a possible strategic partnership with another company, and is also looking at the possibility of acquiring a privately-held company – but it can’t say any more than that yet.
MAID Plc has signed a marketing and technology agreement with Adobe Systems Inc under which it will integrate Adobe’s Acrobat technology into its own Profound software to enable users to view documents as exact replicas of the printed version, including all graphics, illustrations and colour, printing out publications such as newspapers and magazines with the same style and appearance as the original.
The US Federal Communications Commission approved Nynex Corp’s application to build infrastructure for delivering video programming services to its telephone customers.
IBM Corp and Blockbuster Entertainment Corp have apparently given up on their plan to deliver music on-line to record stores for writing onto compact disks in-store, the Wall Street Journal reports; it says they seem to be dismantling the New Leaf Entertainment Inc joint venture and plan to switch to the on-line delivery of multimedia, data and games to CD-ROM disks.
Germany should deregulate the telecommunications industry before 1998 in order to ensure that new jobs are created to replace those that must go at Deutsche Telekom AG, the Federation of German Industry said: Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former IBM Corp executive heading Germany’s powerful industrial lobby, told German radio that the government should allow competition to Deutsche Telekom within the next 18 to 24 months – it is decisive that for every job lost at Telekom three or four new jobs are created somewhere else – that’s what we need, he said, criticising Bonn’s plans to follow Europe and deregulate in 1998 as far too late and saying German industry suffered a hefty competitive disadvantage because of its high communications costs.
Meantime Cable & Wireless Plc yesterday unveiled plans to offer facsimile services in Germany, saying that the new offering could halve the cost of business facsimile between Germany and the US: companies will be able to send faxes over Cable & Wireless nodes in Germany which will be re-routed to switches in London operated by Mercury Communications Ltd; in a ludicrous state of affairs, some long-distance calls within Germany will be rerouted through London and create savings for the customer. – o – Cable & Wireless Plc has won a tender to buy a 20% stake in Sakhalinelektrosvyaz, Sevodnya said: the UK company will $10m in the next three years to modernise Sakhalinelektrosvyaz’s trunk phone lines.
Westlake Village, California-based Packard Bell Electronics Inc says it shipped 2.475m personal computers in 1994 and increased its US market share to 11.6%, referring to International Data Corp figures.
Business Objects SA is moving into Japan with its decision support software with a lit
tle help from Fujitsu Ltd and Ashisuto KK: Fujitsu will bundle BusinessObjects as part of its data warehouse and Fujitsu and Ashisuto will distribute and support all versions – Japanese, English, French, German – of the BusinessObjects product line.
The GTE Personal Communications Services unit of GTE Corp has joined Deutsche Telekom Mobilfunk GmbH to offer international cellular-roaming service between North America and Europe, and some other countries, beginning this summer.
The RS/6000 people are less than gruntled because whenever a big server or downsizing bid comes up, IBM Corp always first bids the AS/400, and only if it is clear that only Unix will wash does it call in the RS/6000 business – by which time the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc will have made copious pitches, the RS/6000 people have to start by bettering their rivals’ best bid, and the business ends up going out of house – but just occasionally, the strategy, laid down because margins on AS/400 are so much better than on RS/6000, does pay off in a big way: Heilig-Meyers Inc, a major home furnishings retailer, has bought 700 AS/400 Advanced System Model 200s to support its US-wide expansion after evaluating Unix systems from Hewlett-Packard and Sun, going for the AS/400 because of its ability to connect to a variety of different systems and peripherals; AS/400s will manage inventory levels in each of the 626 showrooms, and will be used to schedule deliveries from the seven distribution centres via satellite; the machines list for $10,500 each.
Sterling, Virginia-based Star Technologies Inc has filed a demand for arbitration against General Electric Co’s General Electric Medical Systems regarding contract claims arising under a long-standing development agreement between the maker of back-end array processors and General Electric Medical that obliges the latter to buy reconstruction processors from Star for its Computerised Automatic Tomography scanners: General Electric Medical accounted for 78% of Star’s revenues in the year to March 31 1994.
Korkor, Palau-based Palau National Communications Corp has signed AT&T Submarine Systems Inc to construct a national fibre optic network between the islands that make up the Republic of Palau – and yes, we didn’t have a clue where Palau was either: it is a US trust territory in the Micronesian Islands on the Western edge of the South Pacific, not too far from the Philippines.
Clarification: Intergraph Corp’s Mogel version 2.0 is a software package for high performance graphics accelerators, rather than a board (CI No 2,597), and works with 3D Labs Inc’s Glint chip; it costs $200 to purchase or $50 to upgrade. – o – Doom is doomed! Nascar is no more! Sammy got laid – With a few minutes on her hands, an office worker at New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection recently commanded her personal computer to pull up the game of Solitaire, writes the Wall Street Journal – the computer gave her this message: ‘Sorry, department policy prohibits the use of this program.’
