Fiorina's confrontational tenure at HP ends

The New York Times has described Carly Fiorina's dumping as Hewlett-Packard's chief executive and chairman as an ignominious end to a six-year run that began when Ms. Fiorina was made chief executive - and the first woman to head one of America's 20 largest public corporations - as part of an effort to shake up a slow-moving corporate culture.

Back then, says the NYT, she was the subject of frequent and flattering magazine cover stories, in which she was lauded as a supersaleswoman who had excellent communication skills, was tough as nails and understood technology to boot.

The paper adds that her status blossomed to that of a rock star in the computer world. Ms. Fiorina became the public image of the company, starring in television advertisements showing her visiting the legendary garage in Palo Alto, California where the company began.

She also became a globe-trotting evangelist for Hewlett-Packard's leadership in digital convergence,and its drive to be all things to all people, says the paper, and observing that she engineered the Compaq merger against big odds, and then drove Hewlett-Packard into toe-to-toe competition against IBM in corporate services, Dell in personal computers, Kodak in digital cameras and Xerox in copiers.

According to the NYT, Ms Fiorina's personality and management style ultimately led to her demise. She used hardball tactics to suppress the opposition to the 2002 Compaq merger by Walter Hewlett, the company's largest shareholder and the son of the founder William Hewlett.

She even twisted the arms of fund managers to vote their shares in favor of the merger, says the paper,leading to regulators fining Deutsche Bank US$750,000 to settle accusations that it failed to disclose a conflict of interest related to its role in the merger.

Last year, when the company's struggling corporate computer division failed to meet its sales growth targets, she fired three top executives in what many people, both inside and outside the company, saw as a public hanging.

But, the NYT says that in the end, Ms Fiorina's superstar status was also her undoing. The board concluded that she was spending too much time on the road, neglecting the nuts-and-bolts execution of her own strategic ideas.

Though her fall seemed precipitous, the paper reports, a person with knowledge of the board's concerns said directors' worries deepened in the second half of 2004. In September, the board asked Ms. Fiorina to implement a more accelerated strategy for change at the computer maker. Ms. Fiorina resisted. The dispute escalated on when three board members met with Ms. Fiorina, showing her a document that stressed the entire board's pessimism about the company's performance and its inability to compete with Dell and IBM.

The NYT says Ms Fiorina's dramatic departure mirrors her rapid rise to the position as the number-one woman in American business six years ago. She had been known as a top-notch sales executive at Lucent Technologies, the maker of telephone network equipment, and she brought to Hewlett-Packard a luster and a sense of corporate style the firm was badly lacking at the height of the dot-com era.

Also in the NYT., a story by AP reports that analysts say Hewlett-Packard's innovation record has dropped precipitously with the tenure of Carly Fiorina and with the ironic elevation of the `invent' logo as the company's slogan.

According to the AP report, some analysts blame the cost-cutting, which prompted too many veteran HP employees to take their skills to other companies. In fiscal 2004, HP spent US$3.5 billion on research and development -- down from US$3.7 billion a year earlier and nearly US$4 billion in 2002, though still higher than before the Compaq merger.

Google's chief speaks, but not its finance officer

Google summoned financial analysts to its headquarters in Mountain View, California yesterday for its first major presentation since its public offering last August. But in four hours of speeches, company executives barely touched on the company's finances.

The New York Times reports (9 Feb.) that analysts attending the Google meeting said that the company had a formal presentation by their chef but not their chief financial officer.

Indeed, says the NYT., Google's top chef, Charlie Ayers, spoke to the assembled analysts and investors about the lunch he had prepared, featuring entrees like grilled pork tenderloin. The chief financial officer, George Reyes, moderated the presentation and answered a few questions, but did not give a formal talk.

The paper says Google's executives kept to their policy of not discussing expectations for the company's future results, and they declined to answer questions about their product plans.

The report says Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt did highlight a few broad priorities for the company, like adding more types of information to Google's index and using personal information about each user to answer queries better.

The CEO told media that on the advertising side, Google had found its best market in midsize companies that were adept at using the bidding system that decides ad placement. Google was trying to reach out to smaller and larger firms, according to the CEE, and it now sold ads to 227 of the Fortune 1,000 companies, up from 156 a year ago.

At several points Mr. Schmidt tried to argue that Google's strategy was not as haphazard as some critics have asserted. Some analysts have wondered why Google spends time on projects like Keyhole, which displays satellite photographs of the earth, when its more mainstream services, like e-mail and news, linger as prerelease test sites.

The NYT reports that Mr. Schmidt said Google tried to spend 70 percent of its effort improving its search service and advertising platform, 20 percent on related projects like shopping search and e-mail, and 10 percent on experimental ideas like Keyhole. He said that Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders and a mathematician by training, had proved that this breakdown was optimal.

Executives also highlighted their efforts to expand outside the United States. Google has more than a dozen sales offices overseas and is moving other operations there, reported the NYT.

Online banking growing rapidly: US survey

Nearly half of all US adult internet users now manage their bank accounts online, making banking the fastest-growing online activity, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

The New York Times./Reuters report that 44 percent of US internet users bank online, up from 30 percent two years ago, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

The nonprofit group said banking has grown faster than any other online activity since it began measuring internet use in March 2000, reported the NYT.

The research showed that people with high-speed connections at home, those between the ages of 28 and 39, and more affluent households were most likely to bank online.

The paper says the survey of 537 Internet users was conducted in November 2004 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Yahoo tests toolbar for Firefox browser

Yahoo has released a test version of its toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The New York Times/Reuters reports (10 Feb.) that toolbars from companies such as Yahoo enable users to go directly to particular services, such as e-mail or web search, by simply clicking on an icon.

The paper says Amazon.com's A9 search unit also offers a toolbar for Firefox, an open source browser that is gaining in popularity as an alternative to Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.

Yahoo rival Google recently hired the lead engineer of the Firefox Web browser, reports the NYT., fueling speculation that Google will create its own version of Firefox to take on Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Judge: Microsoft pact not a guarantee

The US federal judge overseeing the landmark Microsoft antitrust settlement has said there was no guarantee the pact will put a dent in the company's Windows computer operating system monopoly.

The New York Times/Reuters report (120 Feb.) says that a US District Court Judge said during a court hearing that it was not her job to ensure the settlement gives rise to new competition, only to make sure Microsoft sticks to the agreement it made with the government.

Many Microsoft critics had opposed the consent decree on the grounds that it would do little to erode the company's dominant position in the software business.

The paper says the pact is designed to give computer makers greater freedom to feature rival software on their machines by allowing them to hide some Microsoft icons on the Windows desktop, and by forcing the company to disclose more to competitors about the internal workings of the operating system.

The Justice Department said it was happy with recent steps Microsoft had taken to comply with the settlement, in particular the progress made in giving potential rivals access to key Windows code.

However, in response to a question from the judge, an antitrust division official said none of the companies who have licensed the code were a significant challenge to Microsoft's dominant operating system position, the NYT reports.

A Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule told the court that it was not the goal of the settlement to ``hinder'' Microsoft or necessarily take a bite out of the company's market share. Rather, he said, its job was to remove barriers to competition.

Judge critical: SCO's lack of evidence against IBM

In the US., the federal judge overseeing the SCO Group's suit against IBM regarding Unix and Linux has thwarted an IBM attempt to defang SCO's claims, but voiced loud skepticism about SCO's case.

According to the New York Times (10 Feb.) IBM in 2004 sought a declaration through that its Linux activities hadn't violated SCO's purported Unix copyrights, as SCO had claimed publicly and in its lawsuit. Although aUS District Judge didn't grant that declaration, called a partial summary judgment, he sharply criticised SCO for not producing evidence for its case in a court filing.

The NYT says the judge wrote that "viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities."

According to the paper, the copyright issue is central to SCO's position in the US$5 billion case, which sent shock waves through the computing industry when SCO began it in 2003. SCO asserts IBM violated its contract with the company by moving proprietary Unix technology to open-source Linux.

The case also has caught up Unix licensee DaimlerChrysler and Linux sellers Red Hat and Novell, reports the NYT., however, the paper says customers seem undaunted: Linux server sales continue to boom despite SCO's demands that customers pay Unix license fees or face legal action.

IBM had argued that it didn't need to release any source code because SCO already had all the evidence it needed to make its case: the original Unix source code and the publicly available Linux source code. But the judge agreed with SCO's position that more source code could be necessary.

Sirius approaches Apple on adding service

Sirius Satellite Radio in the US has just announced that it has discussed with Apple Computer the possibility of adding its service to Apple's popular iPod music player.

However, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs did not see the need at this point to combine the functions, a Sirius spokesman said, reports the New York Times (10 Feb.).

Sirius revealed the discussions to media, entertainment and technology professionals at McGraw Hill's 2005 Media Summit in New York on Wednesday.

The paper says that analysts have long said that satellite radio is likely to converge with music players and other portable devices down the road. with Sirius' satellite radio rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings having already introduced its own portable satellite receiver.

Sirius plans to launch its own portable satellite-radio device later this year, the NYT reports.

Firm trying to verify age with biometrics

A leading security company is exploring technology for verifying whether a user is a child or an adult by analysing a bone in a person's finger.

The New York Timers/AP report (10 Feb.) that users simply place a middle finger against a device that attaches to a computer. The device uses ultrasound waves to check more than a dozen biometric attributes, including how much calcium is present (children have less than adults).

The device can then determine the probability the user is a child or an adult.

Shmuel Levin, founder of Israeli company i-Mature, said operators of chat rooms meant for kids could use the technology to keep out adult predators.

The paper reports that I-Mature said it now has a prototype and recently entered a partnership with RSA Security, a leading developer of authentication technology, to turn it into a product.

The company says the product is not likely to hit the market for at least one or two years, reports the NYT.