A tech guy is sitting at the bar just staring at his drink for half an hour when this big trouble-making biker steps next to him, grabs his drink and gulps it down in one swig.
The tech guy starts crying.
‘Come on man. I was just giving you a hard time,’ the biker says. ‘I didn’t think you’d CRY.’ ‘I can’t stand to see a man crying.’
‘This is the worst day of my life,’ says the tech guy between sobs. ‘I can’t do anything right.’
‘I overslept and was late to an important meeting, so my boss fired me. When I went to the parking lot, I found my car was stolen and I don’t have any insurance.
I left my wallet in the cab I took home.
I found my wife in bed with the electrician who was there to get my new DSL line installed and my dog bit me.
So I came to this bar trying to work up the courage to put an end to my life, and then you show up and drink the damn poison.’
In an unprecedented era of planned obsolescence, Hewlett-Packard deserves much applause.
Hewlett-Packard has extended its hunt to find the oldest HP-UX installation in the U.K. The company launched the competition to mark the fact that the operating system has now been around for 20 years.
The owner of the oldest system will win an entry-class Integrity server, a license for HP-UX 11i version 3, installation and a three-year Support Plus 24 Care Pack from HP. Everyone who enters the competition will receive a free 1980s retro console, which contains 101 arcade games. The main rule of the competition is that the server must still be operating and ready to do an honest day’s toil. HP says there has been “unexpected entry levels” and it has extended the closing date of the competition to July 31.
Although recent history surrounding offshore outsourcing has proven that laid off high-tech workers don’t necessarily find equivalent pay or position titles after the pink slip, a new proposed bill could help them to make a smoother transition.
High-tech workers who lose their jobs because of offshore outsourcing would be eligible for up to two years of unemployment insurance, job training and a substantial tax break on health insurance under legislation introduced Monday in the U.S. Senate.
The bill proposed by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), seeks sweeping changes to the federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. As it now stands, the TAA program largely excludes IT staffers, call center employees and other service workers from the extended unemployment help that the government offers to blue-collar workers whose jobs are offshored to lower-wage countries.
The new legislation, officially called the Trade and Globalization Adjustment Assistance Act of 2007, would rewrite the TAA policies and make them far broader. In a statement, Snowe said the U.S. has a responsibility to help service workers because the government’s trade liberalization initiatives are a policy choice. “We therefore have an obligation to ensure that the costs are not borne by the most vulnerable workers alone,” she said.
Marcus Courtney, president of the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, said the Senate bill would “help expand a safety net for workers that have lost their jobs due to globalization.”
Two years ago, I.B.M. was stumbling. Its financial performance in the first quarter of 2005 was well below expectations and the culprit was its big technology services unit, a business under increasing pressure from lower-cost Indian outsourcing companies.
“It wasn’t just the miss, it was that revenues were slowing in services,” Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive, recalled in an interview.
Since then, I.B.M. has made impressive progress. It has increasingly moved up the ladder to offer higher value corporate packages of research, software and services. This is also higher-margin business, where specialized skills matter more than price.
In addition, I.B.M. has hired aggressively in India to narrow the cost advantage of its offshore rivals in traditional technology services like operating data centers for customers and upgrading and maintaining their software.
I.B.M. has been reorganized from a classic multinational company with country-by-country operations, working in isolation, to a more seamless global enterprise with centers of expertise in industries and technical skills, scattered around the world, each a hub in a global network for delivering services.
The changes, according to Mr. Palmisano, amount to “a huge reinvention” of the company.
Its experience offers a textbook case of a company successfully navigating the twin challenges of globalization and rapid technological change, at least for a two-year stretch.
Fed up with slow tape backup systems and under pressure by regulators and auditors to keep data online and readily available, large and midsize businesses are making disk-to-disk backup technology a top priority in their data centers this year.
More than 75% of 150 large companies recently surveyed by TheInfoPro Inc., a New York-based independent research firm, said disk-to-disk backup technology is being used in their data centers; this compares to 67% who were implementing it a year ago.
Still, in the most recent survey, only about a third said they are using virtual tape libraries (VTLs), a form of disk-to-disk backup that essentially uses disk arrays to mimic tape for server backup jobs.
One in four IT managers surveyed said they believe poor archiving practices are a key reason for unchecked data growth. The average company has 250TB of active storage space dedicated to archive-related content. Moreover, the survey found that archive capacity among companies is expected to grow by 52% by the end of this year.
Sean O’Mahoney, manager of client-server computing at Norton Healthcare Inc., Louisville, Ky.’s largest health care system with more than 2,000 physicians, rolled out three disk-to-disk backup systems over the past year. It helped the organization deal with a 50% year-over-year archival data growth rate that pushed the backup window to 20 hours a day.
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Scott Cleland, an analyst at the Washington, D.C. based telecom research group Prescursor has published a 35 page paper “Googleopoly: the Google-DoubleClick Anti-Competitive Case”. The paper argues that the US Federal Trade Commission will block Google’s $3.5 billion acquisition of DoubleClick on the basis that it will allow “Google to dominate online advertising and dramatically increase the opportunity for market collusion and price manipulation in the market for consumer click data, ad-performance tools, ad-brokering and ad-exchanges.”
Those interested can read the full report here. The stand out portion of Cleland’s report is how he describes Google dominance of the online advertising market post acquisition:
To equal Google-DoubleClick’s level of market concentration in the intermediary online advertising market, one single financial services company would have to own:
* The top 15 Wall Street banks/asset managers;
* ~60% of the hedge fund and private equity industries;
* The New York and London Stock Exchanges;
* The two leading providers of financial analytical tools: Bloomberg and Factset;
* Two of the three national providers of credit profiles: Experian and Equifax; and
* ~60% of the Federal Reserve’s and U.S. Census Bureau’s raw market and consumer data.
Google has long coveted the pot of gold represented by Microsoft’s business customers, those lucrative users of such applications as Outlook e-mail, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide presentations.
In recent years, Google (GOOG) has been snapping up companies in hopes of replicating that suite of services, and it finally may be nearing a full quiver.
On July 9, Google said it is paying $625 million for security company Postini, which helps corporations and smaller businesses monitor e-mails and instant messages, encrypt information, and enforce company policies in such areas as the dissemination of confidential information. Google’s third-largest purchase after YouTube and DoubleClick, Postini is the market leader in its field, with more than 36,000 companies using its products.
The software strengthens the grouping of services known as Google Apps Premier Edition, which includes Gmail, Calendar, GoogleTalk, Docs & Spreadsheets, and Personal Start Page. Launched in February and geared toward business users, Premier Edition has acquired a following of some 100,000 small-business customers (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/12/07, “Google Steps Into Microsoft’s Office”).
A Chaser to Tonic System
And it’s adding new users at a rate of 1,000 companies a day, Google says. “We believe this will accelerate the adoption,” Dave Girouard, vice-president and general manager of Google Enterprise, said during a July 9 conference call on the acquisition. As Google’s family of business applications widens, larger businesses also may be more inclined to sample it as a means of cutting down on the number of vendors they use. Small businesses might appreciate a tool safeguarding them from security breaches and an incessant barrage of spam.
