Corporate & legal

Taking a break from hiring people at Yahoo, Microsoft has scooped up a top chip executive from Sun Microsystems.

Marc Tremblay, a Sun fellow and chief technology officer for its chip unit, is joining Microsoft as a "distinguished engineer," Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday. Tremblay, an 18-year Sun veteran, was one of the main architects for Sun's Sparc line of chips. I'm working on getting more details on what Tremblay will be doing in his new role at Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Sun said Tremblay's role would be filled by Rick Hetherington, who has served as co-CTO for … Read more

Acer executives said that Google's Android still has a long way to go before it can be used as the operating system for the hot new category of laptops known as Netbooks. And the CEO of the Taiwanese company hinted that its Netbooks may soon end up on Verizon Wireless' network.

At a press event Tuesday night to launch the company's new line of consumer and business computers, Chief Executive Gianfranco Lanci and Jim Wong head of Acer's IT products business line, told reporters that the company plans to use Google's Android operating system on its … Read more

The Australian government has terminated the National Broadband Network tender process with no winner, instead flagging plans to invest billions of dollars in building its own fiber-to-the-home network to 90 percent of Australians over the next eight years.

Citing "deterioration of the economy," Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Treasurer Wayne Swan, along with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, said at a Canberra press conference on Tuesday morning that the government had not found any of the NBN bids, by players such as Acacia, Optus, Axia Netmedia, satisfactory.

Instead of accepting an NBN bid, Rudd said, the federal government would … Read more

A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.

The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the … Read more

Companies in the wireless industry hope they can jump on the stimulus spending gravy-train as hospitals and other medical facilities seek money from the government's economic stimulus package.

Wireless in the health care industry was a big highlight at last week's CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show in Las Vegas, where Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health, gave a speech and demonstrated how wireless operations can benefit health care.

And this week, many wireless companies and several other big technology companies are gathering in Chicago at a health care technology trade show. Several companies such as … Read more

Motorola announced plans Monday to record $229 million in charges related to layoffs during the first quarter.

In a filing with the SEC, Motorola said that it will have cut 5,600 employees in the first quarter, completing the 7,000 layoffs it has announced since October of 2008. In exchange for letting those employees go, Motorola will have to pay them $216 million as well as record an additional $13 million in charges related to the exit of certain businesses.

Motorola has a goal for reducing its 2009 annual costs by $1.5 billion. The company's handset division … Read more

An "e-mail counter issue" is at the root of at least some confusion over the status of e-mail sent during a Saturday outage to Comcast.net free residential e-mail, Comcast says.

According to spokesman Charlie Douglas, subscribers who regularly access Comcast e-mail through external POP clients may notice a discrepancy between the number of new e-mails displayed on the company's site and in their actual in-boxes. This may be leading people to believe that they have lost e-mail when, in fact, they have not.

Douglas said the company is working on a case-by-case basis with subscribers who … Read more

After taking a beating in the stock market Monday following the reported collapse of a merger deal with IBM, Sun Microsystems stood by its leadership team.

Reuters reported that Sun declined to confirm the breakdown in negotiations, but did say "Sun is committed to its leadership team, growth strategy and building value for its shareholders." Speculation had been building that CEO Jonathan Schwartz was in trouble after The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman Scott McNealy had quashed a possible deal with IBM over Schwartz's objections.

IBM and Sun had been talking for several weeks about a … Read more

There's been chatter on the Web (and Wall Street) for years now about whether Time Warner should spin off its AOL subsidiary. Now, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, it looks as though Time Warner's management is looking to tweak the requirements that prevent it from unloading AOL. So it finally might happen.

On the other hand, AOL's slow drift away from its parent company has been at about the speed of plate tectonics; these "fresh start for AOL" moves are nothing new. It was way back in 2003 that Time Warner … Read more