In this edition of the Weekly Wire we’ve got some very interesting news for you.  To start, we’ve got some more exciting information about Dell.  Last week, I mentioned that Dell has been having trouble meeting their profit goals for the third quarter.  In an attempt to reach these goals, the company has added an item to their sales inventory: AMD Athlon 64 Processors.  The irony here is that all of the Dell’s motherboards are produced to run Intel Processors, not AMD.  They plan on selling the AMD chips individually, not in the computers themselves.  This is all due to high demand by consumers for Athlon processors.  Although this may not do much for profits right now, there may be some implementation of AMD processors in the Dell systems later on.  It’s too soon to tell exactly how far Dell will go with this AMD marketing idea, but with the chips being more “bang-for-the-buck” than their competitors and these being “desperate times in the computer industry”, you can get a good picture of what they have in store.

Source: News.com
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In other news, Microsoft’s head Bill Gates has put out a memo to a few of his employees mentioning that the company is going to see a coming “services wave” that might be disruptive to them.  He also stated that “We have some competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us.”  As I mentioned last week, Microsoft has been looking at an on-line market for their future products and services.  However, companies such as Yahoo and Google have already dominated this market, making it much harder for other companies to venture into this “dominated territory.”  The main focus of Microsoft’s concern is on-line advertising.  Google’s adsense, among other things, has already pretty much taken over most of the internet’s advertising business.  We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft can come up with in the next year.  Only one thing can be certain, and that is that the formerly called “Monopoly” Microsoft has finally met its match.

Sources:
News.com
Microsoft.com
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For those of you out there who use Linux (and for those who don’t, it is a PC alternative O/S to Windows), I may have some sad news for you.  Hubert Mantel, one of the co-founders of SuSE Linux, has resigned after 13 years of service.  He stated that he left because “I’ve just decided to leave SuSE/Novell. This is not [any] longer the company I founded 13 years ago.”  Though Novell does not believe that this will not have any impact on their company, it is still sad that one of the founders of their Linux operation has left them due to problems with the company.  SuSE became part of Novell in 2003, and until now they were doing just fine.  However, recently this company’s leadership has come under some criticism for its “inability to develop SuSE or execute on sales.”  To go along with this, there have been 600 job cuts from Novell in order to reduce costs of production on core projects, such as SuSE.  For now, the company is holding steady, but in the future there may be some decline as many people are not happy with what is going on.

Source: The Register
SuSE Linux Homepage
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How about those of you out there who use a file sharing client?  Maybe you’ve heard of Grokster, or even use it.  Well here’s some bad news for users of this program: it has closed its doors today.  The Supreme Court recently ruled that the sharing of music, videos, and software on this service is in fact illegal.  There is no longer any debate on this issue, as this is the final court ruling as it stands.  However, there is some light coming through these clouds of legal issues, and that light represents the musicians who want to use this P2P program to compensate for the money they lost in people using it.  The good news is that Grokster has announced that it will re-open its doors this winter as a fully “legit” file sharing program.  This way, the musicians can still have their music shared, and charge a small fee to get the money they deserve for their hard work.  And who knows, maybe more illegal “Peer-to-Peer” file sharing programs will follow Grokster and eliminate the practice of illegal file sharing on-line.

Sources:
The Register
The Register
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Last on our list of weekly news, we have some extremely interesting news from IBM.  They say that their researchers have invented a new device to slow light.  Now you may be thinking, “What does this have to do with computers?”  Well, if this device does what they say it can do, it will eventually be able to replace the use of electricity in electronic components, including those in computers.  They could do this by “controlling light speed on a silicon chip using standard microelectronic and nanoelectronic fabrication technology.”  This may also be used in increasing performance of computers.  What IBM has done here is, and will increasingly be, a huge breakthrough for the world of computers and electricity as we know it.

Source: TechNewsWorld
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Well this week certainly has been packed with lots of new happenings.  Microsoft and Novell are starting to show signs of trouble, while IBM has been making leaps and bounds comes to show how the industry keeps tossing and turning every day.  With the holiday season and the end of the 4th quarter coming up soon, all of the major businesses have to get their acts together and prepare for what hopefully ends up being a huge burst of sales for them all.  If they fall behind, it may end up like Bill Gates said, and become a trying time for major companies.  In today’s world, it usually ends up being that only the strong survive; but with major companies losing some of their power, this leaves opportunity for smaller businesses to climb into the ring.  Find out if any of this happens over the next week in the next edition of the Weekly Wire!