"While we take the issue of missing equipment seriously, 36 missing computers does not suggest poor management." 
- A deputy FDA commissioner, after an inventory check showed 36 computers missing, in the Washington Post. 

"Go ahead and write that the network computer is dead.  If I can scare everybody else away, we'll own the market." 
- Scott McNealy, Sun CEO, in the Wall Street Journal, displaying his keen understanding of economics 

--------------------------- 
The best things in life... 
--------------------------- 
So, it turned out *not* to be an April Fool’s joke.  Netscape really did release the source code.  A big party was held in San Francisco (which according to one attendee had a "surprising number of females").  Of course, the most hard-core techies were at home compiling the damn lizard.  Special prize, of course, goes to the tag-team ensemble of Australian programmers for whom it only took 15 hours to put back the SSL encryption that the US gov’t had forced Netscape to remove...  Lots of news was also made by Marc Andreessen for addressing the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and saying that more and more people he knew were using "Windows at work and Linux at home".  Suddenly the press seemed to think that if Andreessen said it, then maybe Linux was becoming a real OS... 

--------------- 
Overhype... 
--------------- 
Lycos made a lot of news with its electronic commerce deals.  That news alone helped push its competitors stocks through the roof (impressive)...  Also, this week, was the dreadfully overhyped study on search engines showing just how much of the net they covered.  Wired’s Hotbot won, but only covered 34%.  Lycos, on the other hand, showed up with a mere 3% of the net covered.  Lycos responded angrily (and rightfully so) that they returned the most *quality* links, and the fewest dead links of any of the engines studied... Everyone made sure to announce this week that they’re selling notebooks with Pentium II, though reports show that with such power in a notebook, you better plan to tote along a few extra batteries (or a long power cord)... 

------------------------------------------ 
Earnings Reports, IPOs and the like 
------------------------------------------ 
Motorola’s stock shot up when they announced a big time reorg, but investors were less keen when a top executive decided it was a good time to leave to go run a startup (even though he was reported to be the likely head of one of the two new divisions)... Broderbund to lay off 7% of their workforce (the 7% who have nothing to do with Myst or Riven?)... Adaptec has also decided to lay off 7% of their workforce (why the magic number?)... Quarterdeck announced that earnings would fall, and that they would most likely report a loss of "several million dollars"... CompUSA warned that lower PC prices and higher costs (I blame the Apple store-within-a-store for this) are going to hurt earnings... Meanwhile, CompUSA competitor Best Buy told the Street it expects a great quarter, thanks to PCs (I’m confused)... GTE to lay off 1,500 workers in a "broad restructuring"... Cable & Wireless also has decided to lay off 1,500 workers to "improve operational effectiveness"... KLA Tencor warned of lower than expected earnings (not a good year so far for the semiconductor bunch)... 

------------------------------------------------ 
Rumors, Conspiracies etc. of the week... 
------------------------------------------------ 
Slate’s editor, Michael Kinsley, is sick of Seattle, and is looking to leave Slate and head back to Washington DC... AMD won’t comment, but sources have been leaking that they are "on top of" their yield problems.  Seems to be just the type of thing AMD would like to have leaked.  I’ll believe it when I see yield numbers... Tied to this are the continued rumors that IBM will simply buy AMD outright... Amex to buy Intuit.  This was a bit of surprise, but the sources on this one feel very strongly about it.  In thinking about it, it does make a bit of sense, doesn’t it?... 

----------------------------------------------------- 
Berating the obvious: (they call this news???) 
----------------------------------------------------- 
Dell and Wang in a partnership to provide service to Dell’s customers in Europe (why yes, this is a response to Compaq-DEC - glad you noticed)... Cabletron’s President and CEO, Donald Reed, resigns (this is not a pleasant time to be in charge of old media, I imagine)... In related news, Bell Atlantic has decided to dump $1.5 billion into upgrading its network... Lots of coverage of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to hire and train 20,000 folks to deal with the Y2K problem... Intel’s Celeron chip isn’t very good when compared with comparable processors from AMD and Cyrix (and everyone acted surprised)... Spyglass, still trying to get something out of Mosaic, has created Device Mosaic, a browser "for everyday devices"... Network Solutions, not content to have a monopoly only in the US has expanded their domain registration services internationally... Can a week go by where Yahoo! doesn’t announce another service?  This week it’s Yahoo games as well as a service by which you can apply to college.  How long until we face a situation where people refer to the web as Yahoo!? (Similar to people calling the Internet "AOL")... NetGrocer to be the "exclusive" online grocer of Excite... In the ever-pointless race for the largest storage device, Quantum has put forth an 18.2 GB drive (just in time for Windows 98)... Microsoft to give all Indiana University students free software (get ‘em hooked early)... NetChannel tried begging for money this week after AOL backed out of a deal with them, and found a few suckers in its current set of investors (they did not rule out the possibility of begging for money sometime soon, though)... EarthLink hits the half-million mark in customers... IRS uses the Y2K problem as an excuse to delay restructuring (they claim that if they don’t focus all energy on the Y2K problem then whole financial system of the US "will come to a halt")... Bill Gates’ net worth hit $50 billion this week, and of course, plenty of news sites felt the need to tell people about this exciting news... Playboy awarded $3.74 million from a company that scanned in pictures from the magazine and offered them over the web... BusinessWeek, which was supposed to start charging for access to its web-site, had to delay that plan due to "technical difficulties".  They’ll try again this week, apparently... Priceline.com goes online Monday... Pandesic’s CEO heads back to SAP as Pandesic tries to figure out what to do next (all this fits with the statement of a top SAP exec last week that Pandesic had proven to be a "disappointment")... Dell cuts prices... Microsoft Outlook 98 has a feature to block spam, but apparently it will block any mail that contains too many exclamation points or has the words "free" or "success" in it (oops)... Fidelity’s online brokerage crashed exactly one minute after the Dow hit 9000 (a "coincidence", they claim)... Dell agrees to pay $800,000 to settle a suit with the FTC for promising a "Dell Software Suite" to customers and only later telling them that the Suite wasn’t available yet... Intel expects strong sales this year, but not yet... Despite a Congressional study showing that there really isn’t a high-tech labor shortage Congress votes to allow more visas to skilled workers... Ditching the VRML standard last week wasn’t enough for Microsoft; now they’re heading off on their own with a streaming media standard (who needs RealNetworks anyway?)... Gateway is the first box-maker to offer free upgrades to Windows 98 to anyone who buys a computer from them... A lawsuit has been brought against Macola software for charging users to upgrade their software to make it Y2K compliant... AMD’s CEO, Jerry Sanders took a pay cut to show his strong belief in the company... Netscape’s latest 10K filing with the SEC sounds a lot more like a legal brief against Microsoft than a standard SEC filing... 

------------ 
Surprises: 
------------ 
Okay, so the Apple board doesn’t really care how long Steve Jobs stays at Apple (does *anyone* care?)... Compaq and H&Q have invested in Audible (why?  As far as I can tell their one product gives you all the functionality of a walkman, but you need to first download everything you want to hear)... AT&T’s WorldNet has "abandoned" its flat-rate pricing for anyone who spends more than 150 hours online (this plan certainly makes more sense than AOL’s raise the price on everyone plan)... At the same time, WebTV decided to raise its price $5 (once you’ve got your customers locked in, why the hell not, right?)... IBM is still plugging away with Java, as the announcement of co-development with Sun on the JavaOS made plenty of headlines this week... Sega, which recently shut down its US division, seems to have changed its mind and is going to release a 128-bit game box (I imagine, simply so they can claim 128-bits, even though 95% of users will have no clue what that means)... California is thinking of passing a bill that would allow ISPs to sue spammers... Planet Computing tried to buy the Newton OS from Apple (who has stopped development), but Apple is apparently asking way too much (not much of a surprise there, now is it?)...  AOL to test xDSL access (could this be a cable company ploy to rely on AOL to mess up, so that xDSL is ridiculed and we’ll all be stuck with cable modems?)... USWeb bought three companies this week to build on its announced "acquisition strategy"... The FCC is thinking of charging Internet phone companies the fees they impose on regular long distance phone companies (a plan that could hurt the IP telephony companies since their strategy is to be the low-cost provider)... Usenet II opens its doors at nearly the same time as the spam-killers on Usenet have decided to cease and desist.   Their expectation is that without their volunteer efforts spam will override many ISPs, and demonstrate the need for ISP diligence in keeping spam away from Usenet (two days into this and I haven’t heard any stories about ISPs in trouble, but maybe they’ll show up during the week)... Vinod Dham, the well-known exec who worked at both AMD and Intel (and is credited with helping to design the K6 and the Pentium) has joined a startup semiconductor firm, Silicon Spice, as CEO.  (I’m sorry, but Silicon Spice still sounds like the name of a porn site to me)... Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, is charged with sexual harassment... 

------------------------------- 
(Mis)Uses of Technology: 
------------------------------- 
Betting on Y2K problems!  A British bookmaker was creating odds on all sorts of different possible Y2K problems.  Apparently there were 50 to one odds on all flights from British airports needing to be cancelled on New Year’s Eve until the gov’t started announcing bad things, and the odds dropped to 5 to 1... Sears is going to deploy a speech recognition technology to properly route you to the correct department when you call (good luck)... Bell Labs comes up with plastic transistor technology (watch out for smarter smart cards)... Online stamps.  The US Postal Service has agreed to test E-stamp’s system of paying online by credit card, and having a special device attached to your printer port to print postage for you (how long before the first hack?  Free postage for everyone!)... At the same time we’ve got Microsoft and the UK Postal Service to thank for the following brilliant plan:  you can send an email to the UK Postal Service and they will print it out and hand deliver it to any address in the UK. They *swear* they will have systems to make sure no one reads it (really!)... I’m glad that IRS decided not to let Bill and Karen Bergen get off the hook by blaming Quicken for failing to report $530,000 in income.  Apparently the software messed up, but come on.  Two thoughts: (1) I don’t care how complicated your taxes are, you should notice when half a million bucks is missing, and (2) anyone making that much cash certainly can afford to hire an accountant to do (or at least *check*) their tax returns... Researchers at Xerox PARC have supposedly discovered a mathematical algorithm that can be used to predict how people surf the Internet (um... okay...)... 

---------- 
Studies: 
---------- 
A study from CRN Inside Spending has shown that small companies plan on increasing their spending on computers this year (big surprise there - of course the study doesn’t say anything on what they’re going to do with the new systems)... Jupiter/NFO Interactive have released a brilliant study showing that TV shows that mention related URLs, find their web sites have more traffic... One-fifth of households in the US are connected to the Internet, according to IDC.  Of those, nearly 60% connect at least once a day... Related to this is a study from Maritz AmeriPoll that showed 74% of home computers have modems, though only 65% have Internet access.  This same study says that of home users, 45% use Netscape Navigator and only 8% use Internet Explorer (and the other 47%?  I don’t know, but my guess is a percentage use AOL’s browser, which is really IE in disguise)... According to a new study by Cyber Dialogue/FindSVP, over 25% of small business feel that the Internet has helped them increase sales... A lot of excess press given to the Dataquest study showing that there really isn’t much of a market for network computers (the irony here being that it was a Gartner Group study - Dataquest’s parent - that brought about the NC craze in the first place)... IDC has released new research saying that the market for used PCs has grown 14% this year... 

-------------- 
Predictions: 
-------------- 
Look for Software.net to be the next overhyped web based company.  They’ve been making a few too many high profile deals in the last few weeks.   This week, alone, they made an "exclusive" deal with Excite and pulled away a top exec from Amazon.com to be their CEO... 

----------------------- 
Memes o' the week: 
----------------------- 
Teen hackers!  Oh my!  Now we’ve got some German teens to add to the list of recently captured teenage hackers.  The press is making out like this is a big story - these *youngsters* can break into our computer systems.  Let’s face it, these are the same youngsters who probably built the computer systems in the first place, and guess what?  They can program your VCR too... Going on and on about the "downsides" of technology.  The latest is that the government is very upset with the new high-quality ink-jet printers as there were, apparently, a huge number of counterfeit money printed by such printers this year.  I’m just waiting for new laws that make it illegal to have photographic quality printers for just this reason (I’m sure Kodak would support that plan)... 

------------------------ 
Too much free time: 
------------------------ 
Okay, so we’re nowhere near Christmas, but this site had me laughing for quite a while.  I especially recommend reading the police report that talks of the extremely "un-Christmas like" behavior of the Santas in question: 
http://www.laughingsquid.com/santa/home.html 
 

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