Having been passed over as the running mate on the Republican presidential ticket, former eBay Inc. chief executive Meg Whitman seems to have now set her sights on the California state capitol. Call it Meg 2.0.
There was a certain irony Monday when Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney jacked up his sales forecast for the Kindle, the electronic book reader developed by Amazon.com Inc.
Ironic because in Silicon Valley–the capital of early-technology adopters and the bleeding-edge users of all things geek–actual sightings of the device are quite rare.
Phew. Apple Inc.’s iconic Chief Executive Steve Jobs does not have a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer he successfully battled four years ago.
At least that is what investors learned by reading the New York Times, in an odd culmination of events that started last week, after Apple (AAPL) reported its second-quarter earnings and an analyst gently asked about Jobs’ health on the conference call.
Jerry Yang sounded downright confident on the company’s conference call with analysts earlier this week, despite the lackluster results for the Internet giant’s second quarter.
He even cracked wise with investors, noting lightly at the onset of the call that Yahoo Inc. (YHOO)
had “quite a disclaimer.”
Ericsson (ERIC) shares are down sharply in early trading after the company reported disappointing Q2 results. As Marketwatch notes, profits of 1.9 billion Swedish kronor came in below the Street consensus of 2.94 billion, while revenue of 48.5 billion kronor were about in line.
The active, diverse and often loud community of eBay sellers now ought to be able to agree on at least one thing: Monday’s ruling from a French court regarding the sale of certain luxury perfumes on eBay stinks.
For all the businesses that the Internet has revolutionized, or demolished, a few industries have remained stubbornly resistant to the promises of the Web. Take the $150 billion car repair business. Auto mechanics are a bit like lawyers. They speak words the average consumer can’t understand, they work at hourly rates that can’t be accurately determined when you have your first appointment, and they charge exorbitantly for a very specialized body of knowledge.
Should he be or not be the CEO?
That is the question many are asking this week about Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder and chief executive who’s marking his first anniversary in the top job.
Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Yang has suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” since he soundly rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo at an initial 62 percent premium.
Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang has not resorted to boorish tactics like calling Steve Ballmer a sociopath or comparing him to Genghis Khan, but his determination to fight off an unsolicited merger with Microsoft at all costs is starting to recall Craig Conway’s ill-fated battle with his former boss at Oracle, Larry Ellison.
I don’t think it should come as much of a surprise that the market is going sideways with an occasional run-up followed by a small collapse, moving along the sand like a crab waiting to get washed out to sea.
Old-timers will say this is because of the uncertainty as to who will be the next president. The technology sector’s particularly vulnerable to this, since none of the three leading candidates is known for tech expertise or appreciation.
Technology needs an Asian candidate or maybe a Swede, or even a white guy from Canada running for president. The three front-runners don’t cut it; I’m not hearing a lot of tech vision from any of them, that’s for sure.
Nobody knows what caused the cut cables in the Mediterranean that interrupted Internet service to parts of the Middle East last week, but there are now conspiracy theories galore written by bloggers and pundits.
Some say it will benefit terrorists and Iran somehow. In fact, the cut cables–originally blamed on ships dragging anchors–look more like a [...]
To see what the future of Yahoo would look like under Microsoft, take a look at the news on AOL this week.
The once proud portal, which famously merged with Time Warner Inc. in the biggest deal of the dot-com era eight years ago, is limping toward yet another corporate restructuring, with sales down, layoffs coming, and thousands of former dial-up customers a day continuing to bail.
Readers of this column know that I had high hopes for the Google initial public offering. Not so much for the fortunes for Google, but for the possibility that its IPO would trigger a surge in IPOs of small tech companies.
It didn’t happen.
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