Business Tech

The trend-setting MacBook Pro and Air both now face tough competition from Hewlett-Packard, which has the resources to match, and in some cases exceed, Apple laptop designs.

I will expand very briefly on a previous post where I compared, on technological merits, the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro and Air laptops with an HP Envy 13 in response to some of the comments attached to the post.

I had stated, as an opinion, that the aluminum-clad HP Envy 13 had eclipsed Apple MacBooks technologically in some crucial areas. Namely, processors offered, screen resolution, graphics, and battery life.

The assertion that the HP Envy 13 has surpassed, in some important respects, the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro in technology shouldn't be that surprising considering the financial and technological resources that HP has.

Companies like HP and Dell bifurcate their lineups into inexpensive (typically retail consumer models) and more expensive (often business models). Some models are of decidedly lower quality than Apple--as many comments quickly point out--but some are equal to or better than a roughly equivalent Apple laptop both in quality and technology.

The Envy 13--which is HP's entry into the luxury laptop category--falls into the better-than-Apple-laptop-technology category, in my opinion. The luxury Adamo line from Dell is also making a play to, at the very least, achieve parity with Apple's MacBook line.

Again, this is an opinion, not a be-all, end-all verdict on the fate of Apple. And not a review per se that gets into benchmarks. I'm just looking at the raw technology.

Opinion pieces invariably elicit strong counter arguments--not to mention strong opinions (or invective). Especially when Apple is involved.

You wouldn't necessarily expect it, but Avast and Google Chrome might be the next peanut butter-and-jelly combo in the software world. Google's nascent browser has paired with one of the most popular free security programs in the world so that when users run the Avast installer on a computer that has neither Chrome nor Avast, they'll be offered a chance to install Chrome simultaneously. This is the first such bundling for Avast in its 21-year existence.

The Chrome option in the Avast installer does two things differently from the more familiar opt-out user experience that many programs provide in an installer in exchange for financial sponsorship. For one thing, the Chrome window only turns up if you don't already have it installed, but more importantly, it forces users to actively choose installation. Neither the "yes, install" nor the "no, don't install" radio buttons are checked by default. Of course, users are forced to check off "no" if they don't want it, but this should dramatically cut down on the incidence of accidental installations that tend to plague otherwise-similar piggybacking installs.

The Avast/Chrome combo may strike some as an odd couple, or at least more beneficial for Avast than for Chrome, but keep in mind that Avast has more than double the users that Chrome does. Google's Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai said Chrome had more than 40 million users at the Chrome OS press conference at the end of October, and the end of November saw NetApplications peg Chrome at 3.93 percent of the browser market, a 0.35 percentage point increase. Meanwhile, on Avast's Web site, the Czech Republic-based security vendor is preparing to fly its 100 millionth user to Prague on an expenses-paid trip.

A Google spokesman indicated that other deals might be in the works. "Users' response to Google Chrome has been outstanding, and we're continuing to explore ways to make Chrome accessible to even more people. This could potentially include distribution via a number of channels, such as the distribution we are currently doing with Avast."

CNET News staff writer Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Intel said Friday that its Larrabee graphics processor will initially appear as a software development platform only.

This is a blow to the world's largest chipmaker, which was looking to launch its first discrete (standalone) graphics chip in more than a decade.

"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer said Friday. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product," he said.

"Rather, it will be used as a software development platform for internal and external use," he added. Intel is not discussing what other versions may appear after the initial software development platform product, or "kit," is launched next year.

Graphics chip analyst Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, said Intel is not hitting performance targets and this became apparent at the SC09 supercomputing conference last month.

"Justin Rattner (Intel Senior Fellow) demonstrated Larrabee hitting one teraflop, which is great but you could walk across the street and buy an ATI graphics board for a few hundred dollars that would do five teraflops." A teraflop is 1 trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics chip performance.

Larrabee, a chronically delayed chip, was originally expected to appear in 2008. It was slated to compete with discrete graphics chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit.

Intel would not give a projected date for the Larrabee software development platform and is only saying "next year."

Intel says its plans are unchanged to deliver this month the first chip with graphics integrated onto the CPU. This new Atom processor is referred to as "Pineview" (the platform is called "Pine Trail") and will be targeted at Netbooks.

Updated at 4 p.m. PST throughout.

A cable giant becomes an entertainment star, while a search giant gets into the DNS business and a software titan becomes map maker.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is buying a controlling stake in the TV network and movie studio NBC Universal in a deal valued at $37 billion. The deal will make Comcast a major media player with several very profitable cable channels, including USA, CNBC, MSNBC, and Bravo. It will also have control over NBC's broadcast networks and TV stations, its film studio, and its amusement parks.

The deal is likely to be scrutinized by government regulators, namely the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. A marriage between the nation's largest cable and Internet service provider and one of the nation's three broadcast TV stations could ignite old fights over media ownership, a la carte billing, retransmission consent, and cable prices.
•  Can Comcast-NBC play nice with Hulu?

Google wants to unclog Net's DNS plumbing

The Net giant, ever eager for a faster Internet, debuts its Google Public DNS service. With it, Google could become even more central to the Net.

Microsoft Bing Maps Beta adds much richer images

New enhancements for Bing Maps include a Silverlight-powered Web application that brings very detailed satellite and street-level imagery to Bing, along with other tweaks.
• Bing Maps Beta: Cool, but limited
• Google Earth peers into California's eco-future

More headlines

ComScore: So far, online holiday sales are up

Company releases metrics for Cyber Monday and the holiday season to date. And like statistics from other research firms, the numbers are heartening for retailers.
• Study: Cyber Monday sees strong gains
• Cyber Monday bargain hunters out earlier
• Tools for creating holiday-shopping lists
• Study: Sites to bring in billions in holiday donations

In nod to media, Google News policy limited

Google's "First Click Free" policy allowed Google News and search users to discover news articles behind paywalls, but it was easy to abuse. Now, there are limits.

Fake CDC vaccine e-mail leads to malware

AppRiver warns of scammers preying on public interest in the H1N1 vaccine through an e-mail purporting to come from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Microsoft: November security updates are fine

AT&T gives up on Verizon ad lawsuit

AT&T has dismissed its lawsuit against Verizon Wireless for running advertisements it claimed confused customers about its 3G network.
• Verizon nixes holiday ads to continue AT&T-bashing

Microsoft actively urges IE 6 users to upgrade

A shopping video and eBay promotion are part of Microsoft's effort to give IE 6 users a reason to upgrade. The company also is trying to move corporate customers away.
• Dell brings Chrome OS to its Netbook
• Latest Firefox beta gets file-handling feature

Barnes & Noble Nook to hit stores later than expected

B&N says it will have the e-readers in some stores on December 7, a week later than expected, because the company is prioritizing delivery to customers who preordered.
• Spring Design Nook injunction denied, but battle's still on

Psystar ceases sales of Mac clones

Following a settlement agreement with Apple, Psystar's Mac OS-loaded hardware is no longer available on its site.

Michael Jackson tops Google, Yahoo search in 2009

That No. 1 ranking should come as no surprise. Web traffic surged on word of the singer's death in June--so much that Google initially suspected an attack.

Google hosts energy experts amid climate talks

Next week, the international community plans to discuss climate change and green energy, and U.S. energy experts kicked things off at Google's offices.

Also of note

• Google runs a fade pattern on home page
• Mark Zuckerberg's grand missive: The translation
• Defense Dept. pulls software over privacy issues

Apple on Friday quietly updated its high-end Mac Pro computer with an option for a faster processor.

First noted by AppleInsider, the 3.33GHz quad-core Intel Xeon option will add $1,200 to the price of the base configuration, which currently sells for $2,499. An option for the 2.93GHz processor, introduced in March, is still available for an extra $400 over the base model.

The current Mac Pro base configuration ships with a 2.66GHz quad-core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor.

The custom configuration options for the Mac Pro also enable buyers to add up to 16GB of RAM, as many as four 2-terabyte hard drives, and a variety of graphics cards, in additional to other components and software.

When it introduced the Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro in March, Apple added options for the Nvidia GeForce GT 120 and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards, as well as three channels of memory designed to cut latency by up to 40 percent on the machines.

While Apple's iMac and Mac Mini are recognized by most consumers for their design, the Mac Pro is the machine of choice by many IT, graphics, and audio pros for its superior power.

In its quest to acquire Tandberg, Cisco is close...but no cigar yet.

The network giant has won 89 percent of the outstanding shares of Tandberg, a healthy amount, but still 1 percent short of the 90 percent needed under Norwegian law to close the deal. The company had issued a deadline of December 3 to capture the required shares or it said it would walk away.

But as of Friday, Cisco is giving every indication that it will forge ahead, citing tendered shares that would put it over the 90 percent mark.

Looking to capture the growing videoconferencing market, Cisco has been aggressive in its pursuit of Tandberg. Based in Oslo, Norway, and New York, Tandberg sells a range of low-cost and high-end videoconferencing tools and systems to companies large and small.

After initially offering $3 billion for Tandberg on October 1, a bid that received a thumbs down from the Norwegian company's shareholders, Cisco bumped its price to $3.41 billion on November 16. Cisco said it still expects the deal to close in the first half of 2010.

In a press release issued Friday, Cisco confirmed that 99.8 million Tandberg shares had been tendered, representing 89.1 percent of all outstanding stock. It also said that additional shares, tendered on November 18 and 20, amount to an extra 2 percent, totaling 91.1 percent of all shares. Though Cisco may see that as a done deal, tendered shares essentially mean that it has gotten a promise to receive those remaining shares at a certain time--they're not in Cisco's pocket just yet.

Assuming Cisco scoops up the necessary shares to satsify Norwegian law, the company still faces regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Justice. The company said Friday that it has received a Request for Additional Information, or a "second request," from the Justice Department on its purchase of Tandberg. This type of request is not uncommon among mergers of this scope. But it requires a prompt response from Cisco to present specific information to the government, which may be concerned about potential anti-competitive effects of the deal.

Cisco said it intends to respond expeditiously to the Justice Department's request and continue to work with the agency in connection with the agency's review.

Staples is selling a big-screen laptop with robust features that belie its low price.

As 17-inch laptops go, it's a lot of laptop for the money, compared with higher-priced systems from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard. Big-screen, 17-inch-class laptops priced a couple of hundred dollars above the Acer typically offer slightly faster processors and higher-performance graphics. But for the average user, there's not much difference.

And what do you get for $479? The Acer Aspire AS7736Z-4809 comes with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, a dual-core Intel Pentium Processor T4300 (2.1GHz), 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, 8X DVD double-layer optical drive, a Webcam, and a 17.3-inch LED display with 1600 x 900 resolution.

A 17-inch laptop with high-definition screen resolution and plenty of memory to run 64-bit Windows 7--that's nothing to sniff at.

The Federal Trade Commission has talked to Nvidia as its probe continues into Intel's business practices.

As CNET reported earlier, Nvidia has complained loudly for years about Intel business practices. Last month, Intel agreed to pay Advanced Micro Devices $1.25 billion to settle a long-running antitrust case against Intel.

In addition to the AMD probe, the FTC has approached Nvidia about Intel's business practices. This time in the graphics chip market, according to an Nvidia spokesperson. The Nvidia-related probe was reported by BusinessWeek.

Intel commands about 50 percent of the graphics chip market. Though Nvidia is the world's leading supplier of "discrete," or standalone, graphics chips, it ranks a distant second in overall market share to Intel, which supplies "integrated" graphics built into the chipsets that accompany all of its processors. Mercury Research estimates the total market for graphics chips, including integrated graphics, at almost $10 billion in 2009.

In the third quarter, Intel had 53 percent of the graphics chip market, up from the 49 percent share in the same period last year, according to Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market. Nvidia took about 24 percent, down from the 28 percent in the third quarter of last year.

Nvidia claims that Intel's "bundling" tactics--the same tactics that AMD has cited for years and that were spelled out in a complaint filed by New York's attorney general last month--are causing it undue harm.

"Intel's tactics with Ion have been the most aggressive we've seen from a competitor," Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang said in a statement provided to CNET last month, referring to Nvidia's Ion chipset that is used in laptops. Intel disputes this.

"We have scrubbed and continue to scrub our pricing practices as it relates to chipsets and processors," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told CNET last month.

And in another feud with Intel, Nvidia has halted development of chipsets for Intel's new "Nehalem" processor technology (marketed as the Core i series of chips), following a complaint filed by Intel in February--which Nvidia then countered in March.

Updated on December 4 at 10:55 a.m. PST: adding comment from Nvidia.

We hear a lot of talk about enterprises moving IT toward a shared services model. That raises the question: Where do they think they're going?

Roughly speaking, moving to a shared services model means adopting a centralized, standardized, streamlined approach to IT. Like all idealizations, real enterprises can only imperfectly implement it. Nonetheless, it serves as a useful goal and measuring stick. Common elements and aspirations include:

Service-oriented: IT is thought of as a provider of services to a business--or, in some cases, multiple businesses. Every IT process, asset, and outcome is understood, operated, and judged in terms of services that IT provides, and how they map to business requirements.

Viewing IT as an organization building, maintaining, and operating a collection of business services--rather than one overseeing a collection of equipment and a pile of code--is a radical departure from the historical IT-is-a-cost-center approach.

Shared and consolidated: Many organizations traditionally created IT "silos." Many formed amid line-of-business (LOB) boundaries; each LOB had its own little IT department. Others formed around technology specialties such as servers, storage, networks, mainframes, virtualization, and app development. Financial services organizations have been the most siloed; some have had nearly 100 distinct IT operations.

Unfortunately, silos fragment IT into many little IT shards, introducing gratuitous complexity and variability. One silo does things this way; another does basically the same thing, but in a different way, or with a different product. Silos don't necessarily work together well. Even when they have overlapping responsibilities, silos often work at cross-purposes to "protect" their fiefs. IT as a whole cannot enjoy economies of scale in staffing, training, procurement, and operations. Often, it's hard to even get visibility to see where economies or simplifications might lie.

A shared services approach consolidates operations, eliminating and minimizing silos, and making them actively cooperate. This consolidation is a prerequisite to globally sharing resources and capabilities.

Standardized and simplified: Consolidation and sharing allows approaches, vendors, strategies, and procedures to be standardized. Vendors can be pared; rather than "one of this, one of that," rational vendor management can be used, such as strategic dual-sourcing. Standardization leads to competition. Less variety also means simpler. Instead of various management approaches (many of them ad hoc), "best practices" can be used. Skills can be shared. External resources, learning, and tools can be brought in, rather than homegrown. And because the systems and interfaces used are regularized, they can be increasingly automated, further simplifying the environment. Standardization and simplification is an iterative process, with each pass enabling further standardization, further simplification. Simplification, in turn, eases scaling, as well as whatever technology or process transitions are required over time.

Agile and effective: Whether you call the desired IT future state agile, flexible, adaptive, dynamic, or whathaveyou, everyone agrees that IT should operate "at the speed of business." IT should be able to wrangle both internal and external resources to design, build, and run the services the business needs.

What the business needs will change over time, given new products, opportunities, mergers and acquisitions, geographic expansion, economic upturns and downturns, and seasonal surges and quiet periods. But whatever that changing mix of needs might be, IT wants to agilely and efficiently satisfy them. That's a tall aspiration, given the relatively static, backroom support orientation of IT of old. But that is the goal of forward-looking IT.

Summing up: A shared services model seeks to create a virtuous cycle between shared and consolidated, service-oriented, and standardized and simplified approaches in order to establish an agile and effective IT capability.

The shared services model is a mature conception of what IT is, what it provides, and what it should be. It's not a product, nor a process, nor a methodology. It's an ideal, a target, a desired state. It organizes IT around business outcomes--and, one level down, operationally, around the services that IT provides. It requires a change in thinking, priorities, and operational style--and change is never easy. Nonetheless, we see organizations everywhere adopting large swaths of the shared services approach--though using varied terminology, and doing so over time, at different paces, depending on their starting points and the urgency of their evolution.