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BetaNews.Com (9 non lus)

AMD: Six-core Istanbul server CPUs moved up to May

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 11:31pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
During the early part of this afternoon's conference call with analysts this afternoon, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts -- one day ahead of a momentous product call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon -- that strong reception and testing for its Istanbul-architecture server CPUs will enable the company to start orders for its first six-core products next month. This will enable shipments of six-core systems from suppliers as soon as June, said Meyer.
This despite a continuing, if somewhat diminished, loss for the first quarter of the year of $416 million, on revenue that was 21% lower annually. The server side of the business, Meyer admitted twice, was something of a downer for the quarter, while sales of CPUs and graphics chips in the desktop and mobile segments rose to compensate. The company continues to be cautious about its outlook, and disputes Intel's claim earlier in the week that the fallout in the technology industry had hit bottom.
7:00 pm EDT April 21, 2009 - Tomorrow afternoon, AMD will announce significant accelerations in its technology roadmap, one portion of which will be an early introduction of the company's 45 nm six-core server processor, code-named Istanbul. This news came late this afternoon from CEO Dirk Meyer, during his quarterly conference call.
"I am pleased to announce that, because of our strong engineering execution, we are pulling in revenue shipments of Istanbul into May, for system availability in June," Meyer told analysts. When Istanbul was originally announced in March 2008, it had been scheduled for sometime within the second half of this year. That move comes on the heels of Intel's announcement last week that it was moving up the shipment dates of its 32 nm Westmere processors, but also extending its window of availability out further, changing Intel's notorious "tick-tock" timing. AMD lost some ground in the server CPU department last quarter, though its executives deny it lost market share to Intel -- they contend it's a bad market for enterprises all around.
"Server was definitely a weak spot," noted AMD CFO Bob Rivet this afternoon. "Spending has been clamped down pretty hard, so server was actually a decline quarter-on-quarter. Strongest growth was in notebooks, then desktops were reasonable but still grew positively quarter-on-quarter."
Revenue from CPU sales overall was still down annually by 21%, but up 7% over the disastrous fourth quarter of last year, to $938 million. Graphics processor sales declined 15% annually to $222 million, in the only market segment where average selling prices (ASPs) actually rose a bit. But with costs out of the way, even with lower prices, gross margins bounced back a full twenty points to 43%, besting AMD's target of 40%. That made this last quarter's loss not nearly as dreadful as the holiday economic storm. (AMD's numbers incorporate the initial operating figures for Global Foundries, its spinoff that now produces chips for AMD.)
"A bunch of moving parts," as Meyer characterized it. While server ASPs were up sequentially, he stated, "On the desktop side, ASPs were flat to actually up a little bit; on the notebook side, ASPs were down, mostly driven by a mix shift in the marketplace towards lower-end machines. In addition, we walked into the quarter with a pretty big inventory position, so we clearly found opportunities to move inventory, which was also part of what drove the quarter-to-quarter ASP decrease. Finally, [when we] stand back and look at it, our server business was down a little bit quarter-on-quarter, while both the desktop and the notebook businesses were up quarter-on-quarter, which affects the overall ASP and moves it down."
So is it over, as Intel indicated it was? Meyer wasn't ready to go that far, telling one analyst, "I would say that the inventory correction is largely behind us, and what we're left with is just uncertainty about end user demand, with seasonal patterns and the overarching economic question playing off against each other.
"What I would characterize the rest of the year as, [is] one of a technology leapfrog," Meyer told another analyst. "Intel came off their [analyst call] and announced the availability of Nehalem. Of course, that's going to take quarters to ramp across the marketplace. Meanwhile...Shanghai, the quad-core Opteron part, plays extremely well and offers great value, particularly against highly scalable systems and high-density cloud computing installations." While Intel's tack last week was to project a fuzzy picture of the future as though it were clearer and upbeat, AMD's strategy today was not to project much of a picture at all, but to stay upbeat nonetheless.
"We are executing well on every major element of our strategy," stated CFO Rivet, "from launching Global Foundries to reducing our cost structure to delivering a growing portfolio of platforms tuned to today's increasingly value-conscious end user mindset...We entered 2009 a very different company than the one you were following as recently as a year ago. AMD, the product company [as opposed to Global Foundries] is a much nimbler operation, right-sized to respond to today's economic uncertainty, as well as the dynamic demands of our world-class global customer base."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
1080i Amazon on Demand comes to TiVo

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 10:30pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
TiVo was definitely an early adopter with Amazon's movie download service, equipping its Series2 and Series3 set-top boxes with Amazon Unbox more than two years ago. As streaming video-on-demand has gained popularity, TiVo's roster of services has grown substantially.
Today, TiVo's version of the Amazon Video on Demand service gains more than 500 high-definition titles from major studios, including new-release films "Frost/Nixon," and "Twilight," and popular TV shows like "Gossip Girl," and "Californication."
Single HD television episodes are available for purchase at $2.99, and HD movie rentals cost between $3.99 and $4.99, and are available in 1080i, with a majority also offering Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
MySQL 5.4 gets bigger anyway, encroaching on new parent Oracle's turf

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 10:17pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced his acquisition of Sun Microsystems yesterday morning, he didn't mention MySQL at all -- his company's principal competitor in the small systems database space. Maybe that was just for spite: It's no secret that Ellison wanted MySQL; he said so explicitly three years ago. It was one of the key missing elements in the top-to-bottom stack he's been looking for, a way to create a line-up of pre-configured systems with everything customers need right out of the proverbial "box."
But MySQL's place in Ellison's stack doesn't extend to the enterprise, where the Oracle DB still rules -- at least in his mind. Eleven million installed MySQL customers plus a resurgent Microsoft SQL Server aside, Oracle DB is, from Oracle's perspective, an unstoppable juggernaut.
While participants in this week's MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara were debating the meaning of changing the flags over the front entrance once again (it was acquired by Sun only last year), the community for the world's principal open source database maintained the course it had set last week. Today, the group heralded the official release of MySQL 5.4, whose principal improvement is bigger and better support for the InnoDB transactional storage engine. That engine will help MySQL enter more enterprises by removing version 5.1's limitation of four cores per instance, moving all the way to 16-processor ("16-way") support for x86 servers with multiple cores per processor, and 64-way support for Sun's SPARC-based CMT servers.
If you remember the days when "Toyota Truck" was an oxymoron in the heavy load division, you know how it feels when barriers are shattered. This puts MySQL into the heavy load category, which isn't exactly inside the boundaries of Larry Ellison's nice little stack.
But Ellison is rarely without an ace up his sleeve, or at least an ace somewhere handy; and in this case, he made sure he had one back in October 2005. That's when Oracle purchased Innobase OY, the makers of the InnoDB database engine. See, MySQL is officially a database management system, which means it's quite capable of managing data stored by other open source engines. While MyISAM is the one designed for MySQL and intended to work with it by default, Innobase developed InnoDB not just for MySQL, but as an open source engine for transactional data. It's through the expansion of MySQL's support for InnoDB that version 5.4's embrace of 16-way servers has come about. Understanding how this particular innovation got started requires us to review a little bit about the ISAM methodology -- specifically, why it's been such a lucky charm for MySQL, up until the point where it needs to expand into the enterprise. For more on that, I'll cite...well, myself, from a textbook I wrote in 1998:
ISAM [Indexed Sequential Access Method] is not another trademark, nor does it represent some proprietary technology invented just for the sake of the cute acronym. Instead, it refers to a technique for locating an entry in a database table. In short, an ISAM driver or server uses a separate table called the index to look up a key number for a record. A key number is a unique entry used to identify that record, such as a serial number or purchase order number. Having found that, the index then points the server in the direction of the true record in the database, thus saving some search time.
ISAM relies on a couple of conditions being met before it can work properly:
- No two records in a table may be identical to one another. If you think about it, no properly conceived database table would have any need for identical records. Even if your table were a catalog of baseball cards and a given collection contained two identical cards, both cards should be given unique identifiers, making their respective records unique.
- At least one column of the database table must contain fields whose contents are unique for each record. Generally, a serial number qualifies as such a column. This column serves to contain the key field that uniquely identifies each record.
For ISAM, at least one separate table is generated for each field column. This table is the index for the database table. It contains two and only two columns: a duplicate of the key field column, and a separate column recording the location of the record in the table whose key field matches the duplicate in the index. The theory here is that because the index table is smaller, it's quicker to search through it than through the main table. But generally, ISAM drivers "cheat" and sort the index column, then employ a binary search instead of a sequential search...which is far faster. So why isn't it called "IBAM" rather than ISAM? Sometimes it's just too difficult to ditch a cute acronym.
Next: MySQL's road around ISAM leads to Oracle, but not the way it planned...
Fast-forward eleven years: MyISAM isn't really all that sequential either, which is why it's so fast. But because it's still algorithmic search grafted onto the sequential model, it's not very well adapted to distributed processing. That's okay if you're dealing with a Web-based server where text searches, for example, are executed from one location -- MyISAM is very well suited for that. But for accounting purposes especially, a database architect needs a way for multiple tables to appear to be updated simultaneously, as well as for those updates to be rolled back simultaneously in case of an error.
A common example for a transactional database involves a system where there are multiple bank accounts. If money is transferred from one account to another, from a sequential standpoint -- the "S" in ISAM -- that's two queries: one withdrawal and one credit. But should the power go out on the server in-between those two queries, the withdrawal might disappear. (That's the secret reason why early database writers performed the credit first.) With a transactional database engine, although both queries are written as though they were sequential, the update appears to take place in parallel. In case of an error, the update doesn't appear to have taken place at all, which is better than the alternative.
InnoDB is a transactional engine; MySQL developers can create tables "in" InnoDB instead of "in" MyISAM. When they do, the texture of their programs changes somewhat to take advantage of the transactional model. And in some cases, searches actually slow down because InnoDB has a larger overhead. But the payoff comes in the form of fuller functionality and greater reliability -- and Larry Ellison knew three years ago that such a payoff would be necessary for MySQL's evolution. He said so explicitly, and that's why he purchased Innobase OY.
Now the MySQL community marches forward, with what was a plan to take on Oracle head-on by supporting a tool...owned by Oracle. Now it's a plan to make a bigger place for itself than just a slot in the Ellison stack.
The early numbers for MySQL are dramatic, with easily measurable performance improvements of about 56% in workload tests, and as much as triple the performance in distributed connectivity tests, thanks to that 16-way support. In a December 2008 test of a MySQL 5.4 beta by Sun's Robin Schumacher, the new engine's capacity for subquery optimization -- a smarter way to break down queries nested within queries -- led to speed improvements in subquery benchmarks of as much as 40,000%. That's not a typo; that comma is in the right place.
As MySQL senior software architect Mikael Ronstrom reports on his blog today, "We have consistently seen improvements in the order of 30-40% of sysbench top numbers and on large number of threads 5.4.0 drops much less in performance than 5.1. The new InnoDB Thread Concurrency patch makes the results on high number of threads even more impressive where the results have gone up by another 5-15% at the expense of 1% less on the top results (there are even some DBT2 runs that gave 200% improvement with the new algorithm)."
Version 5.4 would have been released today had Larry Ellison never entered the picture; in which case, our headline might have read, "MySQL gets bigger: Now what will Oracle do?" If making MySQL bigger makes it better, Ellison's 2005 move may be his insurance policy.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
'Covered Campus' looks to be the first logical use of WiMAX

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 8:34pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Today, Taiwan's Tatung University became the first university campus to be covered entirely by Mobile WiMAX (802.16e). The wireless broadband network launched today, and is accessible by more than 4,000 students and professors.
Considering analysts' suggestions that WiMAX is best used for fixed networks, and the opinion of industry leaders that it is not a viable mobile wireless standard, Tatung's experimental network could be the first wise and thoughtful deployment of the misunderstood mobile standard.
The network, like the one Clearwire is building in Silicon Valley, is intended to serve as a platform for research and development and stimulate creative minds into developing products that utilize its functionality.
Alcatel-Lucent provided the wireless infrastructure, and in today's press conference, such companies as Accton Wireless Broadband, ASUSTeK, China Television, dmedia, D-Link, Gemtek, Intel Taiwan, Polycom Asia Pacific PTE, MOXA Technologies, Quanta Microsystems, and ZyXEL Communications announced their participation in the project.
X86 chipmaker Via Technologies announced it would be contributing its OpenBook WiMAX netbooks to the project, the chassis reference design was open-sourced by Via last year, and includes space for WiMAX, HSDPA, EV-DO, W-CDMA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AGPS radios.
Today's network launch displayed some of the banner functions of mobile WiMAX, such as its ability to deliver consistent indoor signals, mobile and handover coverage, as well as beamforming. Like the ill-fated Municipal Wi-Fi networks attempted by Earthlink which were scrapped last year, the first WiMAX deployments in the United States attempt to cover a large metropolitan area.
The Tatung University network, however, follows the model that proved to be more successful in deploying community-level Wi-Fi, and that is the smaller area with denser network coverage.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Firefox 3.0.9 is publicly available, announcement to come

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 6:26pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
After a weekend of stability testing, version 3.0.9 -- the latest security update to the Firefox 3.0 browser series -- can now be downloaded. As usual, Mozilla isn't making the new version's release public for at least another day, so if you select Check for Updates from the Help menu, you won't see the new version just yet, though you can download it from Fileforum and install it manually without problems.
When the company releases its list of addressed security issues -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow -- expect a larger than normal list. Among the general bugs the organization is addressing is one we've experienced ourselves, especially since many of us use Firefox for communicating with our Betanews CMS: Submitting data content in large forms can sometimes be a real bear, and we've noticed this since version 3.0.7. This issue, among others, has apparently been addressed and fixed.
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 for Linux from Fileforum now.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Video: Is this the state of the Android netbook?

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 6:18pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
German site Netbooknews.de posted a video today displaying a quick demo of the I-Buddie ultra-portable running Android. Though a number of manufacturers have openly discussed the idea of an Android netbook, and testers proved it could be loaded onto a standard Eee PC, none have yet displayed even a working prototype of a purpose-built Android netbook, until now.
There has been a recent spate of rumors about Android netbooks, speculating on a product from anyone from Acer to Nokia, but again, no commitments. The video from Netbooknews.de may show why.
While it does show a mostly working Android environment on what claims to be an Atom N270-based 10.2" netbook, the errors are frequent and functionality is low. In under a minute, there are three force-close messages, and there's really no show of any applications running -- arguably the most important facet of platform adoption.
So there's now video proof that Android netbooks are possible, but there's still no proof that it's viable.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Pirate Bay verdict appealed, party mobilized

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 5:43pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
The District Court of Stockholm's judgment against the Pirate Bay has been appealed, say reports. The keepers of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracking site were each sentenced to a year in prison and a combined 30 million kronor for violating copyright law and enabling others to do the same.
Legal representatives for the Pirate Bay's Carl Lundström are contesting the validity of the District Court's ruling. Their argument is based upon the notion that Lundström was charged as an accessory to copyright infringement without proof that he was aware of crimes being committed.
Representatives for the other three Pirate Bay defendants are expected to file similar appeals in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the PirateBay.org Torrent tracker remains in place, but has been turned into a tool for political mobilization, calling for emergency action against amendment 138 of the European Telecoms Package.
As a result of the media frenzy surrounding the Pirate Bay's trial, the Swedish Pirate Party gained 19,636 new members, according to leader Rick Falkvinge. The challenge now, Falkvinge says, is not to win in the polls, but to get people active in the field of telecommunications reform.
"The establishment dictates who is good and evil," the party head said in his blog, "but none are made to be as evil as those who challenge that very establishment's power."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Interview: Former WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz on paying for online news

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 5:38pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
For newspapers that have seen their advertising revenue -- especially in classifieds -- cut in half or worse by the rapid acceleration of Internet news as an alternative, publishers are faced with a situation where they must transform themselves in order to survive. Just over the last few days, we've learned that Gannett, publisher of USA Today and The New York Times Co. are posting losses for the last quarter at an annual rate of as much as one-fifth, on account of declining ad revenue. Some may not be able to sustain similar losses through the rest of the year, and the Times Co. is threatening the shutdown of the Boston Globe.
Maybe newspaper publishers can save some form of their print media products, and maybe they can't; but in any event, they will need to find some way to make their online operations workable, because print alone will no longer sustain the newspaper business.
There are some who feel the newspaper business isn't necessarily entitled to be sustained. On the opposite side of that issue are congressmen who are proposing legislation to grant newspapers non-profit status, lowering their tax rates as a way of keeping them alive. But newspapers have been threatened before, first by the onset of network radio news in the late 1930s and into World War II, and second by the rise to power of network TV in the 1960s. They adapted and thrived, and one veteran publisher believes it's time for a repeat performance. He is L. Gordon Crovitz, formerly Publisher of The Wall Street Journal and currently partner in JournalismOnline.com, a venture founded with publisher Steven Brill and investor Leo Hindery whose objective is to save print publishers by giving them a single portal for cultivating alternate revenue streams.
Crovitz spoke at length with Betanews last Friday.
Scott Fulton, Betanews: I'll start with what I think would be the most important question that any business entrepreneur would probably be asked by [your partner] Leo Hindery if they were to have a meeting together: How much do you believe, in this economy, an Internet news reader would be willing to pay for a legitimate online news service?
L. Gordon Crovitz, partner, JournalismOnline.com: A lot has changed since the commercial beginning of the Internet. Consumers now are very happy to pay for digital downloads of music, they pay for ringtones, when they're playing video games. They're happy to pay for virtual shields and virtual swords. So consumers, unlike the beginning of the early years of the Web, are quite willing to purchase digital access, digital content, digital entertainment. I remember in the first years of The Wall Street Journal Online, one of the barriers we had was, people did not want to conduct commerce on the Internet. And PayPal and services like that have created trusted digital transactions, and has also created a transaction business online -- much easier than it was ten years ago.
Now, the situation for news publishers is pretty simple: Many news publishers, until very recently, thought that online advertising would continue to grow at 20 to 30% per year, and it's very clear that even though online advertising is a powerful driver of revenue, that in a cyclical downturn of the kind we're in now, advertising will not be as strong. And as a consequence, all the news publishers we've spoken to have said that they are looking at all of their revenue opportunity, including the prospects of charging some amount for access to content or other services.
Scott Fulton: Isn't part of the problem there, with regard to revenue from advertising, the fact that unlike any other news medium up to now, this particular online model is dependent upon advertising that comes from a couple of shared platforms that all these news publishers collectively rely upon -- Platform-A, Google AdSense -- so that revenue tends to flatten out the more popular [a publisher] gets?
Gordon Crovitz: Most news publishers derive the bulk of their online revenue from display advertising online, as opposed to some other category. And display advertising has been growing at the slowest rate, or even contracting. So that's become a much less reliable source of revenue, and [in cases] where it's the only source of revenue online, many publishers are finding it challenging to support a news staff.
Scott Fulton: You mentioned earlier that there are other online businesses which have successfully tested the waters, which suggests that there is some disposable income out there. I think your point is, that if there are some customers that are willing to spend money on the use of virtual shields and swords, maybe they'd be willing to spend some money on hard evidence and hard facts. But I remember that prior to the launch of iTunes, there was a lot of research and concern about, what is the proper level to be charging for a song? And that 99¢ figure wasn't pulled out of the air, that was determined through serious research as to the nature of the relevant market. So I'm wondering whether a similar amount of research is being put into your endeavor? In other words, do we know how much other expendable income there is out there, to be spent and that should be spent and that isn't being spent, on online news products?
Gordon Crovitz: Well, a couple of things: One, consumers do spend a lot of money to access news. They spend that money through print subscriptions, through cable [TV] subscriptions, and others. So people do pay to access news when asked. But the broader answer is, I think, the right model, the right price for one publisher won't be the right publisher won't be the right answer for another one. And part of our model is to allow publishers to set their own terms, their own price, their own products, because it will defer from one to another. What we'll be able to do is collect research and data on what access content services are successful and are popular among consumers, and be able to share that research with the affiliates that belong to our program.
So you're right, in the case of news, I don't think it's going to be one-price-fits-all by any means. And the opportunities we're offering news publishers is to work with them, to help them determine the best model for their brands and content.
Next: How does a publisher build an audience while charging that audience?
How does a publisher build an audience while charging that audience?
Scott Fulton, Betanews: I know your partner, Steven Brill, last November presented a memo to The New York Times, in support of going to an online subscription model...Mr. Brill's comment to the Times was essentially, "You've already done Step 1, you've built an audience. Now it's time to do Step 2, to monetize that audience." That seemed to suggest to me that the business model for online news, as presented at least to the Times, is first to build an audience, and then to charge it. Well, isn't that a little counter-productive? That seems to say to me that the only way to build an audience is to give away your product? I would think that you'd want to start selling...
Gordon Crovitz, JournalismOnline.com: [I think the model Steven suggested] was quite constructive. The launch of the online Journal was presented as free, but there would be a subscription paid. Large audiences gathered, and over time, subscribers were much larger than the number of people who had accessed it for free.
Scott Fulton: I want to cite a paragraph you wrote for a column in the Journal last February: "For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?"
When you were working more directly with Dow Jones, you were the founder of Factiva, [a subscription-only custom business news service]. And that would be an answer to that second question, but it's also an obvious customer-driven, very customer-centric service that produces superior news quality on request for individual customers. Does a news producer, in order to meet the criteria suggested by your second question, the "Right Question," have to be capable of being a Dow Jones, of being a Factiva -- that your staff must produce distinct quality?
Gordon Crovitz: No, no, no. I think every news brand has got its own brand attributes, and there are certain things that its reader expects of it. It might be local news, it might be sports news, it might be some other kind of news. So I think that most, maybe all news publishers, for some fraction of the audience -- I'm not saying for everyone, but for some fraction of their audience -- they will have the ability to craft services that some percentage of their unique visitors will access.
I find that a lot of news publishers don't track this, but what we expect will be the case is that news publishers will continue to provide a lot of content services without a fee. The opportunity is for some percentage of the unique visitors from us to generate subscription revenue. So the online Journal may be indicative, anyway -- there are 20 million monthly unique visitors to the online Journal, 1.1 million are paying subscribers. So about five percent of the total. So if people think of the online Journal as everything behind a paid wall, that's not accurate. It's very much a hybrid model, and I would expect that those publishers would pursue that kind of hybrid model.
[ME's NOTE: In our story last week on the founding of JournalismOnline.com, I inadvertently transposed a few words and never caught myself in the copy edit. So for a while, I stated that Mr. Crovitz had announced his intentions to make The Wall Street Journal online free, when the word I meant to include was Murdoch, as in Crovitz' new boss at the time, Rupert Murdoch. My guest copy editor who finally located my error was one L. Gordon Crovitz, whom I thank very sincerely and to whom I also apologize for the transposition.]
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
IBM feels good, if not 'Sun-ny,' about the months ahead

Publié: avril 21, 2009, 2:01am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Here's something unusual: A company that actually wants to talk turkey about its financial outlook for the next year or so. That would be IBM, which brought forth on Monday a slightly softer than expected revenue report for Q1, but which is confident of returns of "at least $9.20" for the 2009 fiscal year and between $10 and $11 EPS -- at least -- for 2010.
Earnings per share for Q1 2009 work out to $1.70.
Yeah, great. Your reporter's with the Barclay's analyst who couldn't believe it took four whole questions into the Q&A to ask what the heck happened with IBM failing to acquire Sun and What It All Means. CFO Mark Loughridge took that inevitable query with a shrug: "Oracle and Sun have been partnering for two decades, and what's the result? The result is that we've picked up 14 points of [market] share since 2000. We now have 32 points... What's really changed? I think nothing. They have the same address, they have the same mailbox, but we're talking about the same team we've been competing against for some time." Meow, sir.
Q1 earnings weighed in at $2.3 billion, down one percent year-to-year. That's not terribly disconcerting in this climate; the revenue drop -- down 11% to $21.71 billion, or 4% if you account for that pesky strong US dollar -- is wince-inducing. Failing to meet Street expectations in most categories isn't something to write home about, but there was plenty of good-looking stuff in the report for those thinking past immediate circumstances.

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Gross margins were in a full percentage point above expectations at 43.4%. The $10-$11 forecast beats analyst estimates for FY2010 of $9.78, but Loughridge says the company's outpacing even its own higher guidance. Debt's down nearly $3 billion, to $31 billion. And, as some analysts have already noted, these days when a revenue drop is smaller than expected, it's considered a pretty good sign. The patient isn't fully recuperated yet, but sitting up and sipping broth beats the heck out of coma.
Loughridge ended the call briskly: "We hope to see you at our May investor meeting, but for now, as always, it's back to work." And so it was for the after-hours traders, who sent IBM down 1.87% in after-hours trading to $98.55, from its close at $100.43.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009