Gee, these folks at Intel are forever in the news for the wrong reasons.
The Federal Trade Commission sued the chip giant today charging it with using its dominant market position in microprocessors to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly.
The FTC lawsuit comes barely a few weeks after Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion to rival AMD to legal disputes.
The FTC complaint alleges that Intel has conducted a systematic campaign to shut out rivals’ competing microprocessors by cutting off their access to the marketplace and deprived consumers of choice and innovation.
We’ve been shouting ourselves hoarse here that Sun Microsystems is a completely screwed up company.
The saga of this shitty Silicon Valley IT company is one of losses, losses and more losses and crappy servers that fewer and fewer businesses want to buy.
No surprise then that the dying company was sold to Oracle and the company recently announced plans to fire another 3,000 employees on top of the thousands it’s laid off previously.
We’ve long advocated on this blog that all the Sun employees must be fired, the company should be shut down and the money ought to be returned to shareholders.
Alas, our words of wisdom have fallen on deaf ears and the company’s downward slide continues unabated.
Gartner put out its quarterly servers report the other day and the numbers for Sun are plain awful.
A frigging nightmare.
Here, look at the below table to see how badly Sun servers are faring vis-a-vis its competitors:
Of course, if Sun’s server revenues are falling 32%, its shipments must be falling precipitously too.
Right. No surprises here.
Folks, Sun’s server shipments are not merely falling but collapsing. Please see
Sweet.
We always knew that this is how it would play out in the end – Intel on its knees in front of AMD’s open fly.
Uncork the Dom Perignon
Today Intel agreed to fork out a whopping $1.25 billion to AMD to settle all outstanding legal disputes between the two companies.
The settlement covers antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes.
Intel also promised to behave itself in future by agreeing to abide by a set of business practice provisions.
In exchange for Intel’s moolah and capitulation, AMD will drop all pending litigation including the case in the U.S. District Court in Delaware and two cases pending in Japan.
Besides death and taxes, add repeated poor performances by Sun Microsystems to the list of life’s certainties.
IDC put out its server marketshare numbers for the second quarter the other day.
No surprise here, folks.
Sun had a really bad quarter, declining in server marketshare and declining in revenues.
Don’t tell us you expected anything different from the Sun clowns.
Sure, we’re in a recession and overall server revenues fell 30% year-over-year.
But Sun’s server revenue decline of 37.2% was higher than the decline of the overall market.
Sun’s server revenue decline in the quarter was the highest among the Top 5 server vendors, according to the IDC server tracker figures.
Take a look at the server numbers below:
Poor Fiscal Q4
By the way, Sun reported lousy results in its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009 - a loss of $147 million ($88 million profit in the year earlier quarter) on revenues that fell 31% to $2.63 billion.
For the full fiscal year 2009, Sun reported a loss of $2.23 billion on revenues of $11.45 billion.
Worldwide PC shipments fell 5% in the second quarter but Dell’s PC shipments declined by a whopping 17%.
According to the folks at market researcher Gartner, worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter of 2009 was 68.149 million units compared to 71.741 million in the same quarter of last year.
Although in retreat, the PC market performed better than Gartner’s prediction last month of a 9.8% decline.
Boosted by sales of its low-cost PCs, Acer shipments grew 34% year-over-year to 9.196 million units. Acer tied (almost) with Dell for the second spot in the global PC business.
HP took the top spot with 13.371 million unit, up 2.8% year-over-year.
Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said:
In the first quarter of 2009, inventory re-stocking played a
Google’s VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai (pichai is a Tamil word meaning to beg) extends his marketshare/mindshare begging bowl again with yet another DOA project – Chrome OS, an operating system targeted initially at netbooks and over time at the larger desktops as well.
Netbooks are small form-factor DVD-less laptops with superior battery-life and are targeted primarily for light use applications such as browsing, e-mail and blogging although given the Windows XP OS on many of these widgets they can be used for other purposes as well.
In a blog post last night, Pichai and a co-worker describe Google Chrome OS as an open source, lightweight operating system with a Linux kernel.
Google plans to open-source the Chrome OS code later this year and netbooks running the new operating system are supposed to be available from multiple companies. Target date – second half of 2010.
Pichai et al write in their post:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.
Chrome OS is being designed to run on both x86 on ARM processors. Expect Chrome OS to run within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
Google’s promising all web-based applications will automatically work on Chrome OS and new applications can be written using popular web technologies.
Interestingly, Google’s Android OS used in some mobile phones from carriers like T-Mobile, is also targeted at netbooks. Go figure this confusion.
What We Think
Chrome OS is not going to go anywhere.
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