Big Blue not blue
IBM's profits jumped by 65% to $2.39bn in its second financial quarter, thanks partly to a $700m gain from the sale of its global networking business to American phone company AT&T. IBM's revenues were much better than expected at $21.91 bn, which is more than Microsoft managed for the whole year. IBM's hardware sales of $9.4bn were helped by a 50% increase in PC sales.
Statistically, however, Microsoft did even better thanks to the launch of its Office 2000 suite. Fourth-quarter sales climbed by 39% to $5.8bn, while profits jumped 60% to $2.2bn. Over the full year, Microsoft's revenues grew by 30% to $19.8bn, and it made a profit of $7.8bn. Microsoft ended the year with $17.2bn in cash, so it may be looking for some large investments, like the $5bn it put into AT&T. For comparison, Apple's quarterly results, announced on July 14, revealed that sales grew by 11% to $1.6bn. Profits reached $203m thanks partly to an $89m gain from shares in the British chip design firm, ARM Holdings. Apple took a shareholding in Arm when it was spun off from Acorn, when Apple adopted the processor for its Newton handheld computer.
Chips up
Intel is about to launch faster versions of the Pentium III processor, and 600MHz PCs are expected to appear at the beginning of August. Later it will, as usual, cut the prices of its older Xeon, Pentium and Celeron chips, perhaps by 10-15%. All this is bad news for Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices. Last month, AMD started shipping the 600MHz K7 processor, now called Athon, which is faster than current Pentiums. AMD had hoped that sales of more expensive K7 chips would lift it out of the financial mire - it would have lost $162m in its last quarter, but for the $259m sale of a subsidiary. Intel slashed the price of Celeron (Pentium II) chips to fight off the K6 in the low-cost PC market. It can't be expected to ignore the K7 when AMD starts to ship the new chip in volume.
IA or IA?
National Semiconductor duly launched its highly integrated Geode chip last week (left), using IA as an abbreviation for "Information Appliance". This could annoy Intel which already uses IA to stand for "Intel Architecture". However, at least the Geode is an Intel-compatible chip: it's a development of the Cyrix M2 that NatSemi obtained by buying and then selling Cyrix. Not all Intel's chips are Intel-compatible in the same sense. Intel has spent a decade building Risc chips, and is working hard on the Arm business it bought from Digital Equipment Corporation. Neither family is x86/Pentium-compatible.
Fritz wins
Fritz has won the Frankfurt Chess Classic, beating seven grandmasters including Judit Polgar, the world's best woman player. Fritz doesn't have a surname: it's a computer program. Siemens, the German industrial giant, reckons it helped by supplying a Primergy 870 computer with four Intel Xeon processors Next year, it's hoped Fritz will be able to beat the top three international chess players in a Siemens Giants challenge.
WebCam III
Until recently only a real geek could tell one webcam from another, but the market must have got big enough to support a features war. For example, Creative Labs says its new Video Blaster WebCam III has a sensor with more than three times the resolution of previous webcams, a better lens, and a unique snapshot button for taking still images for £69. It also comes with Polaroid PhotoMax software, which can be used to retouch and print images or create "photo fantasies".
Handy
MIT's computer lab is developing a handheld computer, the Handy 21, that can replace a number of separate devices. The development is part of the Oxygen project, described at length in the next (August dated) issue of the journal, Scientific American.
MIT's John Guttag says it's a basic tenet that "whenever possible, we build general-purpose devices rather than special-purpose devices", though many companies are now focusing on "information appliances" that trade breadth of functionality for ease of use.
