HP’s golden goose
When is great not good enough? When you’re Hewlett-Packard’s printing group.
A few years ago, the $28 billion business, headed by veteran Vyomesh Joshi, was the goose that kept laying golden eggs. It supplied most of the company’s profit while the PC group lost money and the corporate technology group struggled. Now new leadership and smart acquisitions have fixed the PC and corporate businesses, and printer sales are showing signs of weakness.
[video] Robots, mood phones and more at Intel research day
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| Click above to see some of the futuristic technologies Intel is cooking up in its labs. |
Earlier this week at Intel’s (INTC) annual research day in Silicon Valley, the company showed projects that could influence the way we live tomorrow.
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[video] Intel CTO talks WiMax, innovation and Apple
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| Click above to see video of my interview with Intel CEO Justin Rattner. |
Earlier this week at Intel’s (INTC) research day in Mountain View, I got a few moments on camera with Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner where he talked about innovation, WiMax, and the relationship with Apple (AAPL).
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Apple and Intel: Best buddies
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| Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air on stage at Macworld 2008. The laptop was born after Intel dug into its research pile to fulfill an unusual request from Apple. Photo: Jon Fortt |
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| Click above for a video interview with Intel CTO Justin Rattner. |
When Apple first announced the switch to Intel chips three years ago this month, Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner didn’t expect a chummy research relationship, even though the Silicon Valley companies’ headquarters are just 15 minutes apart. Friends had warned him that Steve Jobs and his crew of iconoclasts have little patience for the futuristic stuff of research labs – they’re on the hunt for bold ideas they can build into products within months, not years.
So when Rattner, who leads Intel’s (INTC) research efforts, gave a presentation to Apple (AAPL) brass about the range of projects his scientists were cooking up, he was pleasantly surprised to leave the meeting with a list of a half a dozen that Apple executives wanted to hear more about. One thing that wasn’t surprising: Apple wanted the technology pronto.
“Sometimes it’s a little scary because we’re just not used to going that fast,” Rattner says. “They say, ‘We want to do this next year,’ and we go, ‘Whoa … next year?’ We’re just not built for that. But once you get past all that, I think it’s particularly exciting because they really pull it. And I think MacBook Air is a great example.”
Intel: WiMax doesn’t have to win
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| Intel has begun building platforms that combine its microprocessors with WiMax wireless technology. Image: Intel |
About a year ago, Intel talked about WiMax as if it’s the technology that will wirelessly connect the world’s gadgets for high-speed Internet surfing. After all, that’s why Intel has shepherded the standard along for the past several years, backing it with expensive research and building it into the Centrino 2 mobile platform, code-named Montevina, that it plans to announce this year.
HP launches rival to MacBook Air
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| The new Voodoo Envy 133 is .7 inches thin, and has a carbon fiber body strong enough to support a removable battery. Image: HP |
A little more than a week ago, Rahul Sood blogged a picture that showed him cutting his birthday cake with a $1,800 MacBook Air laptop.
It’s so damn sharp, he wrote underneath, it did a fine job.
For Apple fans this was blasphemy, something like drinking Kool-Aid from the Holy Grail, and they swiftly voiced their displeasure on the web. Sood is the chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) PC gaming group after all, so his cake-cutting stunt was clearly not a testament to Apple’s (AAPL) design prowess. While Sood claimed that a merry mix of wine, friends and a good cigar had pushed him to it, his closing statement on the offending blog entry suggested a deeper motive:
Ahh well, I wouldn’t be needing this notebook for long anyways … : ) Stay tuned for more …
What’s still missing from the iPhone
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| The new 3G iPhone is a great update, but it doesn’t come with enough of a software breakthrough to make it revolutionary. Image: Apple |
So there’s a new iPhone. (Yawn.) Big surprise. Any groundbreaking software to run on it?
For me, that was the big question during Steve Jobs’s keynote address at Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developer Conference, and it’s still unanswered. Sure, Apple and its partners made a flurry of interesting announcements, including the 3G iPhone everyone expected. Several of the announcements even involved slick-looking new iPhone software. But was any of it groundbreaking for a mainstream audience? Hardly.
Yeah, OK, 3G iPhone. What else?
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| Attendees wait for the beginning of the Steve Jobs keynote. Photo: Jon Fortt |
Since everyone was expecting the 3G iPhone that Steve Jobs announced Monday in San Francisco, I was officially less interested in that than in everything else. I’m more curious about other stuff – like, what’s next for OS X? Will Apple (AAPL) unveil a new suite of software for the iPod Touch and iPhone? And have third-party developers come up with anything thrilling?
Below, a look at the major announcements, and which other companies are affected.
Intel faces volatile flash memory market
Late last year, Intel got blindsided by the herky-jerky flash memory market. Prices plunged so fast that the tech giant couldn’t make money. The unit’s losses hurt Intel’s (INTC) overall margins, prompting CEO Paul Otellini to promise investors he wouldn’t allow storage chips to continue dragging down the company’s profits. The implication: If this rollercoaster gets too scary, we’re getting out of the flash business.
Well, get your barf bags ready, Intel. It looks like things will get scary again.
Why Moto won’t get its man
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| Todd Bradley heads HP’s $36 billion PC group, and Motorola has courted him to run its cell phone division. Image: HP |
If anyone can rescue Motorola’s phone business, it’s Hewlett-Packard’s Todd Bradley. The question is why he’d want to.
Sure, Bradley likes fixer-uppers like this one. During stints at Gateway, Palm (PALM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), he has burnished his high-tech management cred by building good products for less money than the competition. He’s not a visionary who dreams up flashy stuff – he’s a hard-hat guy who gets things done on time and under budget.
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