BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!
The U.S. government's cap on how many educated immigrants can come and work for companies like Google, Microsoft and Dell continues to spur the economy. Just not ours. But business couldn't be better at the Chilkur Balaji temple on the outskirts of Hyderabad, India, reports the Wall Street Journal. That's where some 100,000 visitors a week flock to pray before Lord Balaji, known as the "Visa God."
Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.
Microsoft is releasing an early version of Hyper-V, its virtualization software, ahead of schedule. Microsoft is competing head-on with high-flyer VMware, which went public in a much-hyped IPO earlier this year. The company, which is majority owned by EMC, is off 20 percent from its all-time high last month. For the 99 percent of you whose business card doesn't say "IT Peon," here's what this means.
Having returned to his own company, Michael Dell has seen his namesake PC maker fall behind Hewlett-Packard and stagnate on Wall Street. So far, he hasn't done much to duplicate fellow company-founder Steve Jobs's stunning second act with Apple. Forbes, in its profile, seems to be hoping he will, but Dell's own words show why it's unlikely:
Shareholders, your buyback is here. Dell is repurchasing $10 billion in stock, starting this week. The company had suspended its share buyback program last year while it worked to correct accounting errors. The company has $15 billion in cash and is making $1 billion per quarter that could be applied to stock purchases. [AP]
Seeking to expand his company's storage offerings, Michael Dell is buying EqualLogic for $1.4 billion. This is a monumentally bad move. Leave aside the details of what EqualLogic does. (Something to do with tying storage servers together on a network.) Let's remember what Dell does. Dell is a highly skilled repackager of commodity tech, like Intel microprocessors, Seagate hard drives, and the Windows OS. Add a few extra parts, slap some plastic around it, and you've got a PC. Sure, it can make some money installing that PC, too. But what it doesn't do, and shouldn't do, is try to advance the state of the art on its own. His own hard experience should have told Michael Dell not to make this deal.
Dell hopes to resume its stock buyback program and return to business as usual now that it has finally restated earnings from fiscal year 2003 through the fiscal first quarter of 2007. Reported earnings were reduced $92 million, less than one percent of total net income over the period of time. [Forbes]
J.T. Wang, the chairman of Acer, looks like such a nice guy. But appearances are deceiving. The Taiwanese businessman is determined to keep his PC maker from becoming an also-ran. His company just announced plans to buy Gateway, the once-famed PC seller bruised by competition with Dell and Hewlett-Packard, for $710 million. The deal cuts at Chinese archrival Lenovo twice — first, by vaulting Acer past Lenovo into third place for PC market share. Second, by disrupting Lenovo's plans to buy Packard Bell, a fading PC brand that's still strong in Europe. Gateway, from a past acquisition, got rights of first refusal on any deal to buy Packard Bell — and Acer now plans to exercise those rights. Let's see — for a mere $710 million, Wang gets bragging rights, a bigger share of the vital U.S. market, and a way to bloody a rival's nose. Sounds cheap to me.
Mark Jarvis, the first chief marketing officer of computer maker Dell, perfected his art at Oracle: Deny, deny, deny, and when denials fail, spin, spin, spin. He boldly slashes at the branding and advertising strategies of Dell's past while outlining, with Oracular swagger, his new strategy for Dell. He says, of his own job, "It's not rocket science, funnily enough" — in a Wall Street Journal interview (subscription required). Unfortunately for Jarvis, the Journal ran a companion piece that paints a different picture: Jarvis's marketing rhetoric doesn't conform to the reality of Dell's production woes.
Dell, the now second place computer manufacturer, is fighting to regain its market prominence through a series of initiatives, including a new consumer-focused campaign which "paints" their new products as fashionable. Will the new direction be a success? The early market response and new full-featured, colored notebooks suggest "yes", but the rest of the campaign points to "no."
Ex-Dell CEO Kevin Rollins is getting the bum's rush on his way out. Other execs who do far worse routinely waddle out of boardrooms with divorce packages in the tens of millions. By contrast, Rollins gets only $5 million — and that's doled out in $1 million installments spread over more than a year's time. Michael Dell may throw in the occasional atomic swirly (gratis) just to maximize the humiliation.
The above laptop exploded at Yahoo's Santa Clara office this afternoon, setting off the smoke alarm and forcing several hundred employees to evacuate the building. An anonymous Yahoo employee sent in the above shot, showing this was one of the infamously combustible Dells, not the standard-issue HPs and Macs, so it may have been a personal computer. The batteries, say Flickr exec and photographer Stewart Butterfield, were Sony.
