Coop's Scoop: ICANN bangs the gavel
Intel will launch Pentium 4 and claim that it is finally back on track with its high-end chips. Still, there will be much debate about the chip's high clock speeds, 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz, versus the benchmark results and real world performance.
Yahoo will be back to court in France defending itself in the never-ending Nazi auction controversy. Bonne chance, but don't be surprised if the local court rules against Yahoo!
Is Apple on a collision course with its dealers? After promising dealers it would stay out of the retail biz, the company is opening at least three large stores. The 6,500-square-foot Palo Alto outlet still needs final signoff on Tuesday from city planners, a foregone conclusion.
And in this troubled time of chads -- dimpled, pregnant, and hanging -- I wish one and all a very happy (and apolitical) Thanksgiving.
Think shoppers will again tolerate the cruddy service they received ordering products from e-tailers last year? No way, San Jose. A new report conducted by Nielsen Media Research and NetRatings suggests that e-shopping is off to a distinctively slow start. What with all the dot-bombs going off, not to mention the Florida Follies, folks are understandably more selective. That will ultimately be GREAT news for the quality sites. E-tailing is not going away but the Web sites that shaft their customers won't be around for the next Presidential election, I guarantee you.
In the political sphere, you have Democrats and Republicans. In the world of Linux, you have GNOME and KDE, the latter's supporters feeling a bit unloved these past few months. No more. KDE got a shot in the arm with the formation of the KDE League -- including the support of several of the big name companies that also threw their support behind the formation of the GNOME Foundation. Aside from the background sniping between proponents of one or the other, the takeaway is this: It's going to be all to the good because the more competition, the better the user experience will ultimately be.
Speaking of Linux, will the upstart OS provide a desperately-needed life preserver to Corel? The company's CEO made the rounds at Comdex talking up Corel's upcoming Linux-based software even as he showed off a new desktop office suite for Windows. With a cool $135 million cash infusion courtesy of Microsoft, Derek Burney can breathe easy for the time being, though not for too long. One big question still unanswered: Will Corel port the .Net development platform to Linux. Corel made the offer but Redmond remains silent.
Carly Fiorina said she accepts full responsibility for the shortfall but investors had no patience for anything short of ritual hara-kiri after Hewlett-Packard came in with a very disappointing earnings report in its fiscal fourth quarter. Even worse from Wall Street's point of view, HP projected tepid revenue growth for fiscal 2001. The only good news was the company's announcement that it had terminated discussions to buy the consulting business of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Fiorina has had a good PR ride up until now. But the honeymoon is over.
On the subject of ended honeymoons and Web upstarts, there's no surprise in the news that TheStreet.com is shutting its United Kingdom affiliate, which failed to secure new funding. This is as clear a harbinger as any about how this story is going to conclude: TheStreet.com is destined to wind up suffering the same fate as the other dot-com dogs.
Oracle's brain drain continues as exec veep Gary Bloom flew the coop to become the chief executive of Veritas. The official spin out of Oracle is that this is just Bloom realizing his ultimate ambition. And I think that holds up to scrutiny. But his departure will inevitably raise questions about the company's managerial bench strength, coming as it does only four and a half months after Ray Lane resigned as president and chief operating officer a falling out with Larry Ellison.
MP3.com forked over some $53.4 million in return for Universal Music Group's agreement to drop its copyright infringement case. MP3.com got off on the cheap. After a ruling by a lower court judge, the company could have been liable for up to $250 million. Thus MP3.com's exhausting defense against litigation by the Big Five recording studios was finally over -- or was it? The other four studios -- Warner Bros. music group; Sony Music Entertainment BMG, and EMI Group -- are ticked off because they received much smaller payments. And late Friday, there was word they may go back to court as early as next week to squeeze out a little more blood.
I thought it was interesting to find a senior IBM manager publicly chiding Intel for its lack of urgency about developing low-power mobile computers. Of course, that doesn't mean Big Blue is any closer to adopting Transmeta chips into its notebook lines.
The FBI found itself with more explaining to do after the release of more documents and a critical report from the Electronic Privacy Information center suggesting that the Carnivore Internet wiretapping system could capture all Internet traffic -- an ability previously denied. And so the Bureau felt the need to clearly understate the capabilities of Carnivore. I can't say that I'm exactly shocked but the gumshoes failed miserably to allay fears that they will ultimately use the system to capture unfiltered information without court authorization. There are about 3,000 pages of material that will ultimately get released because of Freedom of Information requests. This one ain't over by a long shot.
Comdex Special Report
KDE backers: League of their own
Sorry Carly: HP earnings disappoint
IBM chides Intel on mobile strategy
Netscape 6 good as gold?
ICANN names new dot-com competition
TheStreet.co.uk shuts down
Apple shocks dealers with retail move
MP3.com, Universal settle litigation
Power switch glitch hits some G4 Macs
Taking the pulse of the planet