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All the entries posted on February 04, 2008.
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Monday, February 4, 2008
Microsoft: Google’s too big. Google: Microsoft’s too big
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Speaking to Wall Street analysts on Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his surprise $45 billion bid to buy Yahoo would only be good for competition, given Google’s dominance of the search engine business.
“We think this enhances competition,” Ballmer said in New York, according to the Associated Press.”Anything else would be less good from that perspective.”
Wait a minute. Microsoft. Isn’t that the tech industry’s 8-million pound gorilla that has become a poster company for anti-trust problems in recent years?
Exactly, says Google in its only public response so far to Microsoft’s proposed takeover. In Google’s official company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond went so far as to suggest that Microsoft could wreck the whole premise of the Internet if the deal goes through. Google, Drummond goes on to say, is willing to help Yahoo fight off Microsoft any way it can.
“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” Drummond wrote over the weekend “While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
At Yahoo, meanwhile, CEO Jerry Yang says he’s not turning anybody away just yet. In a note to employees, published by the San Jose Mercury News, Yang said merging with Microsoft is only “one of many options that we’re evaluating” to make things better at the pioneering but struggling Internet company.
Stay tuned on this one.
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Dell and EqualLogic get down to business
Dell Inc. launched its first EqualLogic product family today, less than a week after it closed its acquisition of the small New Hampshire company.
The Round Rock, Texas, computer maker announced the Dell EqualLogic PS 5000 series, data-storage systems designed to be easy to install, to manage and to expand as needed. The products are designed to fit between Dell’s entry-level storage products and the high-end storage systems it sells in a partnership with EMC Corp.
Dell recently bought EqualLogic for $1.4 billion, its biggest acquisition and one that landed the computer maker a technology that fits several growing trends in business computing.
While companies’ data-storage needs are soaring, technology managers are seeing their budgets shrink or remain flat in a tightening economy. The budget constraints have driven companies to get more out of their existing systems, using technologies such as virtualization, which essentially lets them make several virtual machines out of one server or storage device.
EqualLogic’s data-storage systems employ virtualization, as well as iSCSI connection technology that’s one of the fastest-growing segments of the data-storage market.