October 12 - 18, 1997

from the Up-To-Date dept

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                                UP-TO-DATE                                        
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                                The not always serious, 
                                not always weekly update
                                on the Hi-Tech Industry
                                October 12th - October 18th
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                Sponsored by the Technology Management Club of 
                Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

                Continually beating the experts' earnings estimates

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Say that again... 
-------------------
"We announced that our revenues were lower, our losses were higher and our
stock went up $3. The Internet is its own phenomenon."
- CNET CEO Halsey Minor

"The bottom line is, why should I? When I look at it, I don't see the
benefit to the station. Show me the money from it."
- Jim Gustafson, a CBS owned radio station's General Manager on why CBS
will not allow simulcasting of its stations on the internet.

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Earnings Reports
------------------------------------
Intel misses earnings expectations by $.03/share and the stock drops 10%
(silly people)... Meanwhile, Texas Instruments' earnings soared... Online
brokerages eSchwab, Ameritrade Holdings and E*Trade have "healthy"
earnings... Kodak's profits: down 43%... Chips & Technologies reported
significantly lower earnings than last year.  No wonder Intel got them for
nothing...  Compaq misses expectations while DEC beats expectations...  Sun
misses estimates by a long shot...  Seagate misses earnings by an even
longer shot... Cyrix losing money... Excite beats estimates by a lot, but
that doesn't change the fact it's still losing a lot of money... @Home
losing more money than ever... Apple (of course) losing money, but they
seem overjoyed that it's less than in the past...

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Governments & Technology, both good and bad
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Congress attempts again to come up with laws for intellectual property on
the internet (how do they do that when they haven't the foggiest idea what
they're dealing with?)... As the U.S. government continues to prove it
deserves to be the laughingstock of the world when it comes to technology,
the British Parliament is looking to use laptops to replace traditional
"red boxes"... Germany is now planning on webcasting all proceedings in
Congress... Vietnam has decided to allow full internet access  to its
citizens... UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair wants all students connected to
the internet by 2002... Europe is investigating Microsoft for anti-trust
practices... 

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Books
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O'Reilly has a new book on Office 97.  O'Reilly, for those who don't know,
publishes wonderful computer related books.  Each book has a great ink
drawing of an animal, that often becomes closely associated with the topic
of the book (e.g. Perl and the camel).  Anyway, the animal for Office 97?
The Dodo...  Larry Ellison's authorized biography, as written by Mike
Wilson, is, indeed, titled: "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison"...

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Berating the obvious: (they call this news???)
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MSN upgrades and (surprise!) doesn't work, shutting users out of the
service for quite some time...Compaq lowers prices, and decides to sell via
the web (finally)... Marc Andreesen's role continues to decrease at
Netscape (Egads, is this the end of Boy Wonder?)... Video on Demand for
free (via Freelinq) in Trump Tower... U.S. "not the slightest bit prepared"
for a computer attack... CompuServe totally revamps service (and swears it
has "nothing whatsoever" to do with pressure from new boss Steve Case)...
Reed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Chilton are all one company now, as, it
seems, they may have realized that they're getting killed by the
internet... Lots of hype about nothing new concerning the Merced chip from
Intel & HP... Developer release of Rhapsody is out for the six or seven
people who want it... Meanwhile, Apple felt the need to reduce prices up to
$1,000 and offer cash back incentives, since (guess what?) no one seems to
be buying their machines... ICG Communications buys Netcom for next to
nothing... Comedy Central doesn't want online versions of South Park,
despite the fact that's how many people first found out about the hit show
(silly executives, don't you realize?  It's free advertising...)...
AltaVista triples index... CD Now to spend $10 million in advertising for
e-commerce... Sun debuts Java chip... Microsoft's online support for IE4.0
accidentally displays its main help page in Swedish... Cyrix claims it has
rights to Intel's Slot 1 secret design via its merger with National
Semiconductor... Two more execs leave Apple.  Soon it'll just be Steve Jobs
alone with the virtual empire in his mind... Online Marketers agree to
"police themselves" concerning spam.  Oh yeah, that's gonna work wonders...
NCR cuts 1000 jobs... Encyclopedia Britannica finally moves to the web...
http://quicken.excite.com/ ... Apple forces macosrumors to shut down...
Excite buys Netbot... Time Warner looking to acquire Infoseek...  Barnes &
Noble blames $20 million spent on its website for its weak earnings...
Geocities gets more visitors than MSN... Steve Case resigns from Excite's
board... IE4.0 has a huge security hole... Rambus unveils new chip
technology... IBM to have a "job buyout" to get rid of thousands of jobs... 
New CEO at AT&T: former Hughes CEO, C. Michael Armstrong...

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Surprises:
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GTE jumps into the fray and puts up $28 billion for MCI (which makes the
rumored AT&T buyout of GTE just slightly more interesting, yes?)...
Earthlink (!) fines spammers $200 a day... In Oakland, all new public
housing projects will be required to have computers and internet access...
NASA's Cassini probe didn't decimate half the country... Mcafee buys
Network General, and renames itself Network Associates, becoming the
third largest PC based software provider... AOL & Netscape form messaging
service... Microsoft looking to throw another billion into cable.  This
time it's in the direction of John Malone's TCI... AMD and DEC to develop
the K7 jointly... IE4.0 cannot run on many Compaq Presarios... Netscape and
Microsoft to work *together* on content?????... ClariNet tops Inc.
Magazine's list of internet companies.  ClariNet?... Amazon.com, who many
people felt was strongly positioned since it had virtually no inventory
holding costs, has decided to build two huge warehouses... Microsoft has
recently settled a trademark lawsuit with a British supermarket chain that
has been making a line of women's underwear named microsoft (It's too bad,
since that would have been a fun trial to follow)...

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(Mis)Uses of Technology:
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Turns out the "internet through your power lines" discussed here last week
won't work in the U.S... U.S. Senators got to test out Internet2 last week
by examining a "3D Virtual Ear"... How much do you think Andy Green would
have to pay on the speeding ticket for hitting 764.168 mph in a car this
week?... European E-Mall sponsored by Microsoft... The winner of the
"Ignobel" prize (prizes for mediocrity) for economics: the inventor of the
Tamagotchi... MusicBot, from BMI, will surf the web looking for music
copyright violations... MIT "fashion show" demonstrates wearable computing... 

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Studies:
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Zona Research says internet has "a long way to go" to become a major retail
force... Of the top ten web sites visited in September, half were search
engines according to RelevantKnowledge... The latest from Open Market's
Internet Index: 58 percent of internet hosts are in the U.S. and 65% of
public schools were connected to the Internet last year (mine still isn't).
 Also, percentage of people who remember a banner ad from a Web site: 12.
Percentage of people who remember a TV ad: 10...  IDC has found that 59% of
US companies have Intranets (38% of European) and next year expect that
number to rise to 77% in the US and 75% in Europe... A study by Spiral
Media has found that business leaders want more tangible results from their
web investments... Apparently those funky ergonomic keyboards are "bad" for
you... Ovum research has conducted a huge studying suggesting that more
e-commerce will take place over televisions, rather than computers...

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Predictions:
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Money Magazine's new pay web site will fail... Watch out for Lucent!  This
week they sucked up Livingston Enterprises and now there are rumors that
they're buying Ascend... 

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Memes o' the week:
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Legal wrangling over internet domain names is just getting plain silly.
Apparently this week Compassion Net is suing Compassion International over
compassion.com (seriously).  For those of you wondering, both companies are
charities... 

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Too much free time:
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See the card ideas that Shoebox rejected:
http://www.shoebox.com/funny/funny.asp

*********************************************************************
Up To Date is written by Mike Masnick from whatever news he hears from 
whatever sources they happen to come from.  It is not intended for any uses 
other than as one of many possible ways to follow what's going on in the 
hi-tech industry.  I certainly wouldn't rely on it as your only source of
info.  And, of course, my comments may not accurately reflect reality. 

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