News Mueslix

A secret informant has alerted me to some more news on Google. Don't ask who, because I can’t reveal my source. I’d rather go to jail and bunk in the New York Times cell block before I…Okay, so it’s this guy I know and he has a subscription to Wall Street Journal online.

But anyway, seems the dynamic duo have bought themselves a plane—like Travolta style. They haven’t bought a house, but they buy jet airplanes. The Journal's Kevin Delaney, Lynn Lunsford and Mark Maremont report:

Wide-Flying Moguls:
Google Duo's New Jet
Is a Boeing 767-200

On the road, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have owned environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius. In the air, they apparently prefer something roomier.

Google Inc.'s two billionaire founders, both 32 years old, will soon be cruising the skies in a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner.

White-Shirt Guy: Stop dancing
Black-Shirt Guy: I won't
White-Shirt Guy: You know I can't take it, you know I can't take it. Stop dancing!
Black-Shirt Guy: No. I will not.
White-Shirt Guy: You are a bad man.

Well sorry for the delay on the posts, I'm sure many of you missed me. I want to thank all my fans for writing in and declaring your support and anticipation of the next post. Okay, okay it was just one note and, thanks mom. On to the news.

Google used to be so cute...now they're just plan aggressive
ComputerWorld is reporting that Google is seeking clients of enterprise search rivals by Offering trade-in to draw new customers to its Search Appliance.

Organizations that rip out their enterprise search systems and replace them with a Search Appliance by the end of the year will receive a free Google Mini, a simpler and less expensive version of the Search Appliance, Google said yesterday.

The Google Search Appliance, first introduced in 2002, is designed to index information stored in a variety of server-based data repositories, such as intranets, public Web sites, relational databases, enterprise business applications, content management software and legacy systems.

The Google Mini is designed for small and midsize organizations that want to make the information in their intranets or public Web sites searchable.

So, there’s an interesting small-medium business and enterprise story here. Google is moving into the Enterprise arena, but keeping it real by helping out the little guy. Because you know Google cares about the little guy.

Also, eWeek is reporting on Google’s desire to patent something called Automat technology. Why eWeek is reporting on a company wanting to patent something is curious. I actually want to patent a device that changes baby diapers but you don’t see eWeek covering that….Anyway, this Automat seems to be a major piece of its online retailing and advertising strategy. The eBay killer might be on its way to market and I have a feeling another dirty diaper is headed my way.

So this could actually be a Google Blog
Don’t want to keep talking about Google, but how could you not. New material in the battle between Microsoft and Google coming from InformationWeek

The Microsoft-Google rivalry certainly isn't news, but technology guru Ray Ozzie's comments were the most specific to date on the threat Microsoft sees in the search leader. Bill Gates also had much to say about competitive threats in another memo.

An email from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and a related memo from Ray Ozzie, one of the software giant's three chief technology officers, have been leaked onto the Web. The documents are kicking off intense interest in the company's apparent internal discussions about missed opportunities in the wake of Google's success.
The Ozzie memo, and Gates's email, can be found on Dave Winer's blog.

"While we continue to make good progress on many fronts, a set of very strong and determined competitors is laser-focused on Internet services and service-enabled software," Ozzie wrote in the memo directed at Microsoft's executive staff. He then singled out several rivals, Google in particular.

"Google is obviously the most visible here, although given the hype level it is difficult to ascertain which of their myriad initiatives are simply adjuncts intended to drive scale for their advertising business, or which might ultimately grow to substantively challenge our offerings," he continued. "We knew search would be important, but through Google’s focus they’ve gained a tremendously strong position."

Links to the Dave Winer’s blog here and the InformationWeek story, here.

Earnings Watch
Dell—The world's No. 1 personal-computer maker (DELL: 29.02, -0.07, -0.2%) expects to earn 25 cents a share on $13.9 billion in revenue. Excluding $450 million in charges the company will take to account for restructuring efforts and defective product parts, Dell estimates it will earn 39 cents a share.

Cisco— Cisco fell 1.6% to $17.47 after Chief Executive John Chambers forecast late Wednesday that sales in the fiscal second quarter ending in January will rise 8% to 9%. Wall Street analysts were expecting sales to rise 11% to $6.73 billion.


RIM could be singing the Blackberry Blues soon
So if it wasn’t bad enough that the govment wants to shut down the popular CrackBerry, RIM is facing tougher and cheaper competition from wireless vendors.

Around 1 percent of the world's 650 million corporate e-mail accounts are plugged into hardware and software that forwards incoming messages to a mobile device. More than half of those, about 3.65 million, use RIM's BlackBerry.

Oil Watch: My car has been so dirty these days because I can’t afford the good ole’ Chevron Wash/antenna ripper offer/dent creater/starch maker. But boy did it shine.

Chevron CEO attacks energy policy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. energy policy's focus on the environment and new fuel specifications historically has hurt efforts to increase the nation's refining capacity, Chevron Corp.'s chief executive said on Wednesday.

"From a U.S. energy policy perspective, the focus has been on environmental and fuels investments, not on investments that add to production capacity," Chevron CEO Dave O'Reilly said before a Senate hearing on energy prices.

O'Reilly also said U.S. energy policies had hurt the development of domestic energy resources.

A maze of regulatory and administrative barriers at the federal level, for example, prevented Chevron from developing a natural gas field off the Florida coast, O'Reilly said.

As a result, consumers in Florida receive gas from Angola that is shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, he said.

"This is clearly not an efficient and economic use of resources for the United States, or the rest of the world for that matter," O'Reilly said. "Yet it is the direct result of our historical energy policies."

"Most of those 650 million will be mobilised within three years," said Scott Cooper, vice president for mobility solutions at Nokia's Enterprise Solutions group.

The reason for his optimism is that Nokia, like Microsoft, will practically give away wireless access to business e-mail.

So, lots of players will jump in the market, although don’t know why they waited so long, and pending government regulation should make this an interesting event to watch.

And now, I'm off. I'm making like Willie and will be on the road again.

Well I missed a post yesterday, but it was for a very good reason. I was kidnapped by aliens and forced to drink Starbucks and then fell into a Sudafed induced sleep. I'm awake but my head is still cloudy. Anyway...

Someone should have watched My Name is Earl

MEDFORD, Oregon (AP) -- A woman bought a winning lottery ticket worth $1 million with a stolen credit card and could wind up with nothing if convicted, police said.
Christina Goodenow, 38, of White City in southern Oregon faced numerous theft-related charges, forgery and possession of methamphetamine, said authorities, who searched her home Thursday. The card belonged to a deceased relative, they said.

If convicted of any of the charges, Goodenow will not be able to collect prize money from the winning ticket, said police Lt. Tim George.

You know Carson Daly wasn't stupid when he invented this thing called Karma. I'm just really upset that Christina won't win any money for actually having the motivation to go and purchase a lotto ticket. I guess even the crackpipe doesn't hinder one's ability to pay the "stupid tax."

Indictments

Scooter Libby has been indicted. Chaney's heart would have skipped a beat today, but since he is not human, he simply just grunted.

A picture is worth a thousand words, when you accidentally delete your digital wedding album and your wife will scream a thousand obscenities

Dell will start to offer a lazy man’s way of data recovery by selling computers with a ghost hard drive. So, if a customer were to delete needed documents they wouldn’t have to deal with messy recovery software, rather just call up Dell and enable the spare hard drive. The hard drive isn’t extra space, just a copy-cat drive.

Enterprise Watch

Fujitsu Ltd. is preparing for an aggressive push into the multicore arena with its SPARC64 processor.

SPARC64 VI will be the Tokyo-based technology company's first dual-core processor, and will first appear in the new systems—called the Advanced Product Line—jointly developed with Sun Microsystems Inc. that are due in mid-2006, according to a presentation given by Takumi Maruyama, manager of enterprise server development at Fujitsu, at the Fall Processor Forum 2005 show, in San Francisco.

Wal-Mart wants to America to pay workers more…just not the sick ones.

An open letter to Wal-Mart:
Your supply-chain and distribution channel amazed me during the recent hurricanes. Your charitable contributions to school aged children affect by the storms was unbelievable. And I applauded the Fortune magazine article that celebrated your achievement that surpassed even the Federal government. But alas, you have failed me again.

Yesterday you said that you want to raise the minimum wage. And, not because you wanted to give your employees more money to buy that little-needed health insurance, but because you didn’t want customers to be struggling paycheck to paycheck.

"The U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade and we believe it is out of date with the times," Scott said. "We can see first-hand at Wal-Mart how many of our customers are struggling to get by. Our customers simply don't have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks."

And now today, an internal memo was released that details ways you’re trying to cut operating expenses. An internal memo sent to the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. board proposes numerous ways to hold down health care and benefits costs with less harm to the retailer's reputation, including hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from seeking jobs, the New York Times said Wednesday.

I don’t even know to start on this one. But I don’t have to. You feel my pain.

Slow Growth to Blame for Software Consolidation

InformationWeek is reporting on a new Research and Markets paper that states large vendors will delve into other software sectors to make up for falling revenue. Just when you thought software consolidation had to do with a strategic plan to align business and IT, it’s in fact a strategic plan to buy more IT to make the business plan.

The global software market reached a value of $132.2 billion in 2004, demonstrating and compound annual growth rate of 4.1 percent from $112.7 billion in 2000, according to the guide. Western producers dominate the market because clients believe experience and investments make them better prepared than smaller competitors to deliver cutting-edge solutions, the report stated.


Earnings Watch

Amazon reported lower quarterly profit sending the price of its shares down 8%.


It’s a Google world, you just live in it

Google is now going after eBay. This adds another front to their war on Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, VOIP vendors, Wi-Fi vendors and broadcast companies. Google is offically out of control.

I would have had this killer bog, but I lost it. People stopped, children cried and screamed some expletives. Anyway, here’s the news today as I see it.

- IBM is leading an open source group to make storage management software. Remember we discussed that HP was focusing on storage management software, yesterday?

- Nominee for the Federal Reserve is a fan of IT investment. Will discuss how a chargeback SOA can only be realized with a flexible ESB and a heterogeneous software stack with outsourced IT staff.

- Intel is delaying the launch of its dual-core Itanium 2 processor, Montecito. The public will have to wait until January to get these time continuum bending processors. Special thanks to Cody James for that one.

- Yummy News: Chipolte will be going public with a $100 million IPO. Wonder if with all that new money they will still charge 75 cents for guacamole?

I’m traveling north today. I’ll be singing 100 bottles of beer, counting yellow Volkswagen Beetles and asking myself if “we’re” there yet.

Count It
Texas is the #1 team in the World…well in the computer world of the BCS. But one day we’ll all be ruled by computers, so this is the future. Hook ‘Em Horns!

Apple’s iPod gets iScratched and Consumers are iSuing
A class-action lawsuit accuses Apple of knowing that its new iPod nano portable music player could be easily damaged by normal use. "Although it was clear that the Nano was defective, with fierce competition in the digital music industry, Apple decided not to delay the release of the defectively designed Nano, but to pass the cost of replacing the defective product along to class members," the lawsuit read. "Moreover, rather than admit the design flaw when consumers began to express widespread complaints about the screen's propensity to scratch easily and excessively (and rather than agreeing to replace them as Apple had done with respect to Nanos with cracked screens), Apple concealed the defect and advised class members that they would need to purchase additional equipment to prevent the screen from scratching excessively."

iOuch.

So, drinking a liter of Dr. Pepper, eating a pound of french fries and three hamburger patties is good for me. Tell me more.
McDonald’s will be launching an ad campaign that will debunk recent attacks on its quality and safety practices of its food. McDonald's on Monday will kick off a two-day media event to tout the quality of its food and combat critics who say its burgers and fries are unhealthy. Ronald & Co. with this new campaign hope to tell America to shut its big fat mouth.

And, now when you’re eating all that healthy saturated fat, you can eat in stylish surroundings. A Scottsdale, Arizona McDonald’s has installed flat-panel tvs and hopes to be "the four-star restaurant of the fast-food arena." Waiter. What wine to you recommend with the McRib?

It’s a Blooooog on a blog, it’s like a frooog on a lilypad. Isn’t it ironic? No. No, it’s not.
Here’s some news about blogs:
Wired -- No Longer Safe for Work: Blogs
Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

eWeek -- Industry Giants Press Blogs into Service
NEW YORK—Attracted by the prospect of speaking directly to their customers and appealing to the key people who influence them, corporate marketers are embracing the blogosphere and pressing for ways to leverage "social media" in the enterprise.

This week's meeting probably had the largest attendance EVER. There were so many people in the room the fire marshal busted through the glass doors and counted people. They quickly realized they were supposed to be on the 2nd floor of the building fixing the faulty fire alarms. But, before they left they did say that we had a whole bunch of people in the conference room and they could tell this was a pretty hard-hitting meeting.

As the Biggest Loser competition kicks off, chocolates o'plenty were passed around the table to discuss the following:

Microsoft makes bid at Intelligence
Microsoft announced they have a BI solution. Steve Lohr of the NY Times reports:
Microsoft Office, the familiar toolbox of desktop computing, is a huge and lucrative business, but demand has slowed. In a new bid for growth, the Microsoft Corporation plans to announce today that it is making an ambitious push into the $13 billion-a-year market for business intelligence software. Full article here.

A brief discussion ensued about what implications the news will have for our clients. The consensus was, none. The MS strategy will need present itself further. We should be cautious of how we discuss this news with people. Wouldn't want to re-position anyone because of Gates & Co.

Roker Me Like a Hurricane
A very disturbing trend is blowing through the minds of the media, reporters going outside to chronicle the force and power of hurricanes. MB recalled a GMA doing a segment from Texas Tech during Rita that said when hurricane wind speeds reach 140 mph there is a possibility to remove skin.

NBC weatherman, Al Roker, apparently did not see rival GMA's spot and instead reported from Florida this morning. He was swept away by its power, literally. Wiiilllllmmmmaaaa!!!

Gartner IT Expo
MC reported that the major news coming out of Garter's annual exposition was HP's news of no news. HP continues to anger the media as it keeps to its message that it's going back to basics. No more iPod, no more flashy keynotes, no more Carly.

HP will continue to build its enterprise software business, most notably in the storage software management category. It seems Mark Hurd was reading all those articles and books about the Dell model and, now wants to get him some. More information here.

Other events going on:

• Novell has laid off 20% of its workforce. I've emptied a 40* for my homeys. (*40GB harddrive that is)
• Unisys has said it too will lay off workers. Almost 10%*