Showing posts with label HP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HP. Show all posts

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Land of the up‘set’ Sun

Sun must ideally go back to the negotiating table with IBM; it will be tough for it to survive on its own

If they are still part of the game 8 years later, Sun Microsystem's shareholders deserve a special reward for their patience. Or may be they need to undergo a detailed medical check up to assess the level of their sanity. They have seen the company's management perform miraculous deeds in these years. A stock that traded at around $250 in those days of the dotcom boom now trades at a pathetic $6.42 (as on April 13). It isn't a cake walk to achieve such numbers!

Not that shareholders are always napping though. Sun's stock dropped by a precipitous 23% on April 6, when talks with IBM for acquisition of the company (for a price of around $7 billion) were reported to have collapsed. It shows that IBM was a hope that shareholders were desperately latching on to, a hope that seems to be fading away now. There are a few smiling faces of course; in companies like Intel, HP and Dell, which would have found the going tough if IBM would have successfully taken over Sun.

More interestingly, the old guard seems to have come back into the reckoning. Current CEO Jonathan Schwartz was apparently in support for the deal while the founder, previous CEO and current Chairman Scott McNealy was against it. Speculation is that Schwartz may exit from the company now. Schwartz seems to be on borrowed time already. His strategy to make the company lead in open source hasn't yet paid off, and this deal was a ray of hope for him too.

Sun and IBM had been in talks for holy matrimony for over three months now but it is being said that the deal has been called off because there were differences with regard to the settlement price and some other terms of the agreement. For instance, Sun was reportedly eager that IBM staunchly go ahead with the deal even if the regulatory challenge over monopoly charges gets stiffer. “The reason for this deal not materialising could be the result of IBM not getting blown away in the deal heat and making a prudent decision in these tough times,” informs technology analyst Rob Enderle. Many analysts feel that Sun is making the same mistake that Yahoo! made about 14 months ago. As a coincidence, founders played spoilsport in both instances.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Intel inside: For how long?

Could technology be weakening the ability of our minds to learn?

Movies like Inception are setting the box-office cash-registers ringing for their portrayal of how technology can be used to invade our dreams. At the same time, there is a real-world debate on how the constant presence of technology is weakening the ability of our minds to learn. The American technology expert and author, Nicholas Carr recently mentioned that Google may be responsible for us “losing our ability to engage in more attentive ways of thinking.” This isn’t the first time that Carr has raised this question, whose 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, raised a furore among top executives from HP, Microsoft and others. In 2008, he wrote an article titled – Is Google Making Us Stoopid? – where he highlighted that the Internet may have adverse effects on our minds’ capacity for concentration. In the same vein was his recent interview, where he proposed that Google should make its products tougher to use in order to give our brains some exercise. His stand contradicts Google’s philosophy, which is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

Carr’s discontent is not with Google alone; he has expressed his worry about the ease with which we have information available. Prolonged and unchecked Internet usage could cause Attention Deficit Disorder, Internet addiction, or even social isolation. We are also getting used to reading information in snippets from various sites instead of spending time on a single web page. Prof. Maryanne Wolf at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, has expressed her concern over the effect technology could have on the reading abilities of the coming generation. “The problem of a less potentiated reading brain becomes urgent in the discussion about technology. We human beings are not just the product of what we read, but how we read. The essential question is: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?” said Wolf.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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