Unless they are the kind of investor that can turn on a pin, selling everything at the first whiff of a setback, anyone tempted to leap aboard Wall Street’s runaway train, of which, clearly, there is no intelligence in charge, should lie down in a darkened room until the feeling goes away: there may be a few percent more left in the raging US bull market, but the run-up to 4,700 – 700 points in four months – makes a gentle decline from present levels extremely unlikely, particularly at a time when a mere hint that Microsoft Corp might be a trivial two or three weeks late with Windows95 is enough to make the entire market – the General Motors Corps and the General Electric Cos as well as directly-affected technology stocks – dip as happened the other day, so a loud crack and a headlong plunge is now very much on the cards before the year is out – and you know that markets always overdo things on the down side as well as the up; Tokyo is now almost completely decoupled from Wall Street, but there is no evidence that London is, so if Wall Street cracks, expect a similarly spectacular plummet over here too.
The US Justice Department has responded to the get of our backs suit from Microsoft Corp by outlining of a potential antitrust case it could bring against the company, but told the judge its investigation was still pending: the government believes that Microsoft’s forced inclusion of the Microsoft Network access software with Windows95 might, under certain facts, violate the antitrust laws, and Microsoft points to no potentially applicable exemption from those laws it says.
Meantime commercial on-line services reported a 17% jump in subscribers over the past three months as they hustle to add customers before Microsoft Corp enters the business, the Wall Street Journal reported: it quotes a survey showing that there are now 8.556m subscribers to consumer-oriented on-line services, and that America Online Inc registered the most spectacular growth, to 3m from 2m in the quarter, put-ting it just behind CompuServe, with 3.2m subscribers; Prodigy Services Co grew to 1.6m customers; the minor players are Rupert Murdoch’s Delphi with 140,000, Apple Computer Inc’s eWorld with 90,000, and General Electric Co’s GEnie having a mere 75,000 subscribers.
Xerox Corp’s Xerox Engineering Systems is to buy plotters 0EM from Encad Inc, San Diego, California.
Electronic Data Systems Corp is developing an emergency cash service that would enable people to wire money through automated teller machines, the Wall Street Journal reported: the company plans to have a prototype of the system ready in September and could make the service commercially available next year: to use the service, a customer would visit an teller machine, insert a card and key the appropriate cash transfer option, key in the amount to be wired and a 10-digit code, such as a phone number, known to the intended recipient; it would then would print a receipt with a randomly generated four-digit code, which the recipient would also need to get the wired money; all the information would then have to be passed along from the sender to the recipient in a phone call.
In the US, the new AlphaStation 600 from Digital Equipment Corp starts at $29,300 and as well as that machine, the company also has new models of the existing 100MHz AlphaStation 200, starting at $5,000, down from a previous $6,000 entry.
Xerox Corp will be putting US copier prices up 3% to 8% next month.
The China Accounting Office and Hong Kong Star Internet Ltd have signed an agreement to put Chinese statistical information on the Internet the Xinhua news agency said.
It is likely that the Labour Party will win the next General Election in the UK, so for the first time in 16 years, what it says has to be taken seriously: Walworth House confirmed on Fridat that the party favoured an approach that would give cable firms time to build up the markets in their franchise regions before allowing in full competition, but it said that the sug
gestion that British Telecommunications Plc would be allowed into the market where the cable operator had had seven years to establish its market was speculation.
Packard Bell Electronics (Canada) Ltd has signed Guelph, Ontario-based EMJ Data Systems Ltd as exclusive distributor for its new Executive personal computers, the company’s first computer line designed for medium to large firms.
San Jose-based Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc has formed a new Netcom Business Services Group arm to develop and enhance business software for use on the Internet.
Web page Schweb page! Manchester United Plc, parent of Manchester United Football Club, wants its own cable television channel so that it can broadcast all the club’s games: if it did decide to go ahead, it would have to do so in co-operation with the Premier League, which holds the television rights tothe team’s games, Reuters notes.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp thinks it doesn’t have to connect their local lines with new common carriers, Kazuo Inamori, chairman of new common carrier DDI Corp declared in Tokyo on Friday: splitting up the company is the only measure to establish equal footing for newcomers and NTT, and to realise the social justice; he said the phone giant should be divided into a long-distance unit and two local units so that newcomers and NTT’s long-distance unit can compete on an equal footing.
The US Federal Communications Commission has proposed a new way of dividing the frequency spectrum allocated to digital services so that new satellite systems and wireless television systems can share the same band: part of the band will go to the wireless television technology called Local Multipoint Distribution Service, which will offer two-way video communications in competition with conventional cable television, and the remainder of the band will go to fixed satellite systems and feeder links for the planned cellular satellite systems.
Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corp’s Harris Semiconductor has opened a design centre in Singapore, which also provides technical support for other design centres in Japan and China: Harris Semiconductor makes semiconductors and integrated circuits for automotive, wireless communications, telecommunications, video and imaging, power supply and power protection applications.
Canadian Marconi Co, Montreal, has won another contract, worth about $6.2m to expand the facsimile network of Korea Telecom, Seoul: the aerospace and communications electronics manufacturer says it will add five remote sites to the Korea Telecom domestic fascimile network, which has over 30,000 subscribers.
Xephon Plc’s Handbook of IBM Terminology defines Stabilize as send to the knackers yard, as in the water-cooled mainframes – Hosier uses the 8100, but that is rather a long time ago now – have been stabilised (hasn’t quite happened yet, but it’s said to be imminent), which would mean We’re not going to do any more development work on the software – we’re much too busy parallelising everything – we ain’t making any more boxes, and pretty soon we won’t be providing fixes.
