As Microsoft and Intel move apart, computing becomes multipolar

THEY were the Macbeths of information technology (IT): a wicked couple who seized power and abused it in bloody and avaricious ways. Or so critics of Microsoft and Intel used to say, citing the two firms’ supposed love of monopoly profits and dead rivals. But in recent years, the story has changed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, has retired to give away his billions. The “Wintel” couple (short for “Windows”, Microsoft’s flagship operating system, and “Intel”) are increasingly seen as yesterday’s tyrants. Rumours persist that a coup is brewing to oust Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current boss.

Yet there is life in the old technopolists. They still control the two most important standards in computing: Windows, the operating system for most personal computers, and “Intel Architecture”, the set of rules governing how software interacts with the processor it runs on. More than 80% of PCs still run on the “Wintel” standard. Demand for Windows and PC chips, which flagged during the global recession, has recovered. So have both firms’ results: to many people’s surprise, Microsoft announced a thumping quarterly profit of $4.5 billion in July; Intel earned an impressive $2.9 billion. ...

Another push to sell pay-television to the Germans

THERE are plenty of things to buy in a German supermarket, but little that is truly appealing or expensive. So it is with German television. Dozens of free channels carry a mixture of home-grown stuff and dubbed Hollywood imports. They strike most people as good enough. As many investors have painfully discovered, it is perhaps harder to sell pay-television in Germany than in any other rich country. Yet they keep trying.

In a sense, Germans do pay for television. Public broadcasters levy compulsory fees of €18 ($23) per month on every TV-owning household, a quarter more than Britain’s BBC. Many viewers also receive free television via satellite or cable. Analogue cable connections are cheap—about €10 per month—and often bundled into apartment rents. Only 5.4m households plump for true pay-TV, according to Goldmedia, a consultancy. That works out to less than 15% of all television-owning homes. In America, it is more than 85%. ...

Freeing fat-cat felons creates moral hazard, Koreans fear

ON AUGUST 15th Korea celebrates its liberation from brutal Japanese rule. For South Koreans languishing in prison it is an especially joyful day, since many of them are freed. Every year thousands of criminals, big and small, receive a presidential pardon. Some citizens worry, however, that pardons are disproportionately granted to the rich and influential.

Last December, for example, Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung Electronics and reputedly the country’s richest man, had his conviction for tax evasion expunged. This will make it easier for him to promote South Korea’s bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. In August 2008 Kim Seung-youn, head of the Hanwha conglomerate, was pardoned. His crime involved beating some bar workers who had attacked his son. When he grew tired, he admitted in court, he let his bodyguards take over. ...

The new dean of Harvard Business School promises “radical innovation”

HENRY KISSINGER, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) was vicious. But he is sure that the stakes were not small.

HBS is hugely influential. The school is a training ground for America’s business elite: a striking number of the top office holders of Fortune 500 companies, including the heads of General Electric and Boeing, sharpened their skills and elbows there. The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business. It sits on an endowment of $2.1 billion and employs some terrific thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. It developed the “case method”—using case studies to teach students about real-world business problems. It claims to be the source of four-fifths of the case-study materials used in the world’s leading business schools. ...

An industry that could lift millions out of poverty, in theory

IT IS impossible to eradicate child labour, sighs Rajesh Goyal, the owner of a garment factory in Jaipur, northern India. No children sweat in his factory. But he is sure that some of the family enterprises that supply him employ their offspring. He adds, perhaps in jest, that most textile workers are Muslim, so “if a young boy doesn’t work he will end up a terrorist.”

Textiles provide work for more Indians than any other sector, bar agriculture. The industry employs some 35m people directly and 88m indirectly. But thanks to rigid labour laws, it is fragmented and inefficient. It is hard for a firm with more than 100 workers to fire any of them, so most stay tiny. Vast Chinese stitching-shops have no such worries. ...

LOUISVILLE, Colo. and OTTAWA, Ontario, July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Zayo Enterprise Networks, a fiber-based communications provider, and BTI Systems, the company that redefines metro service delivery, today announced the successful deployment of a new generation of high speed Ethernet services for their customers in Memphis, Tenn. This rollout provides Memphis-area businesses with a...

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As part of the sponsorship of the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark, a crack team of SAP BusinessObjects experts is working hard in the control tower to turn their business expertise into a custom sailing analytics experience.

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Tomorrow, Second Life creator Philip Rosedale will give Linden Lab?s corporate strategy presentation to the company?s customers, at the most perilous time in the virtual world?s history. A darling of the Internet industry only three scant years ago, Linden?s profitability has been eroded by company efforts to turn SL into a real world business [...]

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The new dean of Harvard Business School promises ?radical innovation? HENRY KISSINGER, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS)

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