Business currents

"Today, HP announced first quarter results amid one of most difficult economic downturns that any of us has ever faced. I am proud to say that we continue to execute well in this very challenging environment."

So began Mark Hurd's recent letter to Hewlett-Packard's employees. Hurd, who has earned a justifiable reputation for straight talk, did not mince words. Like every other tech company these days, he explained, HP is feeling the impact of slowing global demand for IT products.

In black and white, here's what happened in HP's first fiscal quarter:

•  Personal … Read more

Hewlett Packard and Sun did their best to put everyone on Wednesday's conference call to sleep. (Do these guys try to sound like Lurch from the Addams Family when they run through their prepared remarks? Just asking.) Still, the news will be of especial interest if you are either a Solaris or ProLiant customer.

The deal gives HP the right to distribute software for Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System on the HP ProLiant server and blade system platforms. HP also will shoulder responsibility for technical support. It's a one-stop shop arrangement that the companies hope will help … Read more

A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.

It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.

Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast … Read more

Say this about Microsoft: the company may not hit the right note with a product on its first or second try, but it perseveres.

So it was with a panoply of Microsoft products--Windows, NT, Internet Explorer, Xbox--where later iterations were head and shoulders above the original. Will we be saying something similar about the advertising platform the company is still building?

Impossible to say, but the news Monday of a Microsoft Publisher Leadership Council is designed to help the brass get it right with the next incarnation of the company's online publishing platform.

The company announced plans for AdCenter … Read more

About two years ago, Jeff Bezos used the occasion of his appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk up the merits of EC2 and S3, Amazon's entries into the then-nascent area of cloud computing.

The predictably perky CEO was enthusiastically regaling a standing-room-only ballroom about a future in which his company would sell data storage infrastructure and server capacity by subscription: the idea being that customers of the new services could move quickly from idea conception to a successful product by farming out the infrastructure side for Web scale computing to Amazon.

"We make muck so … Read more

One of the great things about Silicon Valley can be that freewheeling engineering culture. And one of the worst things about Silicon Valley? Yeah, it can also be that same freewheeling engineering culture.

When companies are flush, it's all grand. Beer bashes, special outings to the beach, and hugs all around between corporate divisions. But culture clash is unavoidable in companies with strong engineering traditions. And when times turn tough, the constant, low-grade tension that defines the sometimes awkward relationship between sales and engineering boils over and inevitably leads to finger pointing. We saw it happen at Apple. We … Read more

I hate it when someone else beats me to a post, but no sense crying about it. Besides, David Kirkpatrick sums up the situation far more eloquently than I ever could:

"All those people on the blogs and in the press who are obsessed over Facebook's valuation are really a bore. Anybody who thinks Microsoft's $15 billion valuation ever was a real common-stock valuation doesn't understand much about finance. And nobody but Microsoft would have wanted to lead a round at that valuation--getting into Facebook had unique value for the company which most of all wants … Read more

It's the small things in life.

So it is that when your car battery dies, you can jump-start the engine using generic cables sold by any of the thousands of retail locations that stock the item. And fairly soon, charging up most cell phones will be just as easy: seven wireless operators and handset makers just agreed at the GSMA 2009 conference to standardize chargers.

Terrific. But when it comes to laptop PC power adapters, you'd be well advised to heed the tag line from a well-known American Express commercial: Don't leave home without it.

Because if … Read more

TradeComet.com has sued Google, claiming that the search company abused its market dominance to "squash" competition.

Rick Rule, who works for the company's law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, claimed that SourceTool.com and its subsidiary, TradeComet.com, "had a thriving business before Google decided to eliminate them as a competitor...We believe this complaint has strong merit and represents a serious antitrust violation."

It also turns out that Rule helped represent Microsoft during that company's antitrust battle with the United States government. The Cadwalader law firm also was employed by Microsoft on … Read more