Within International Business Machines Corp., Robert W. Moffat Jr. was known as a “quintessential IBMer,” rising to Big Blue’s top echelons by relentlessly cutting costs to boost profits. To the rest of the world, he is becoming known as one of the highest-ranking executives to be embroiled in an insider-trading scandal since Wall Street was rocked by such schemes in the 1980s.
I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends.
Semiconductor luminaries honored at a black-tie ceremony in Silicon Valley Saturday night didn’t get a lot of time on stage. Most posed a few seconds for a photo with their award, said a few words about how honored they were, and left the stage. Andy Grove couldn’t resist doing a little more, including comparing commerce in patents to the actions that brought down Wall Street.
A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like financial economist David X. Li, who derived a now-widely used mathematical formula, might someday earn a Nobel Prize. Today, though, in the midst of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all.
For the past few Februaries, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes the trek to Wall Street to provide analysts with an annual “Strategic Update” overview, in which he covers the areas where Microsoft plans to invest and why. This year, during his Feb. 24 update, Ballmer was more about circling the wagons than staking out new, far-flung territories Microsoft planned to conquer in the next 10 years.
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
Before the last of Wall Street gets sold off as day-old fish on Fulton Street or washed into the East River altogether, it’s worth asking, what is Wall Street these days anyway?
Until this week, most technology companies seemed to be weathering the meltdown on Wall Street.
But Monday’s sharp selloff on tech shares–which pushed the Nasdaq to its lowest level in more than three years–shows that the ripple effects of the crisis in the financial sector and the near-collapse of the credit markets are being felt.
A funny thing has been happening to Google lately. Have you noticed? It’s going up!
And I’m not talking about the one-day pop it got from those surprisingly good earnings, which shocked just about everyone on Wall Street and sent Google shares soaring.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant’s death and Om Malik’s heart attack as examples, Matt Richtel built a case for Web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful. But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking broader, what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being that has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.
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