Can Google Get Social Networking Right?

The company has many social projects, but may struggle to improve on Facebook. By Erica Naone

 Rumors that Google is building a new social network have persisted since late June, when Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg.com, posted on Twitter that the Web giant was working on a challenger to Facebook. The company's recent actions--its reported investment in Zynga, a social gaming company, and its acquisition of Slide, a company that makes various applications for social networks--have fanned the flames.

Credit: Technology Review

Google already owns several products that encourage online social interaction--including YouTube, Google Talk, Google Reader, and Blogger. But it has struggled to deliver a successful dedicated social networking service. Its existing social network, Orkut, has far fewer users than Facebook (around 100 million, compared to 500 million), and is mainly popular in Brazil and India. And the launch of Buzz, a social network built into Gmail, was botched after users complained that their privacy had been invaded. Google has acquired several promising social services, including the microblogging site Jaiku and the location service Dodgeball, only to hold back on investing in them.

Some argue that Google has failed to deliver the kind of overall experience people expect from a social network. "Google has never come out with any [social networking product] where the experience drove it," says Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a consulting firm based in North Andover, MA. "It was always the technology and the engineering that drove it--the experience was sort-of layered on afterward."

Spool notes that other failed social offerings from Google, such as Lively, its foray into virtual worlds, and Wave, an experiment in online communication and collaboration, originated as side projects for the company's engineers. Spool says that it is hard for side projects to be expansive enough to become a fully featured social network.

Nick O'Neill, a social-networking industry expert who runs the blogs The Social Times and All Facebook, says Google is desperate to get more involved in social networking because Facebook is collecting commercially valuable information that Google can't access.

O'Neill says that sharing content with friends provides important data on users' interests and behavior--useful both for providing better search results and delivering more effectively targeted advertising. To maintain its dominance in both fields, O'Neill says, Google needs to hone its search results by considering a user's social connections and the information shared with friends. Google may believe it needs its own social network to get the best social information, he says.

Google's existing social offerings are scattered, and it will take a focused effort to pull them all together, Spool says. He thinks users will expect nothing less than a spectacular new product from the company. "Google has way too much baggage," Spool says. While users might forgive a startup social network for lacking features, they'll want any offering from Google to have full integration with Gmail, Docs, and its other products.

Google already has popular communication tools, and plenty of content being shared on sites like YouTube, Picasa, and Google Reader. It is also involved with OpenSocial, a system for adding third-party applications to social networks, and has FriendConnect, a service that lets websites add social features that allow users to interact with each other and pull in content from social networks.

But Google will have to tread carefully as it tries to gain traction against Facebook. "A social network only works with a social graph in place," says Spool, referring to the connections between users on a social network site. With Buzz, Google tried to populate its social graph automatically, using links between Gmail users. But the resulting backlash--as users felt their privacy had been violated--shows that Google cannot easily exploit the user data it already holds.

Spool compares Google's Facebook problem to trying to compete with a popular frat house party. Another group can try to get a better keg and a better band, he says, but if most people are still at the frat house, there's not much that can be done. Users need a good reason to switch to a new social service. Google may have been hoping that an innovative social service, such as the now-canceled Wave, which offered a completely new approach to online communication and collaboration, could draw users away from Facebook, he notes.

Facebook, meanwhile, has its own problems, and some of these could turn out to be opportunities for Google. Ben Gross, an expert in online identity, notes that Facebook and other social networks don't accurately differentiate between people's social connections, making their social graph information less valuable to users and advertisers. For example, social networks tend to put all of a user's connections into a single group of "friends," and expect users to manage complex privacy settings to sort out family, work connections, and bar buddies. "Social network services should not assume that networks are flat, or that people are willing to put in the effort to articulate these networks or that they even want to," he says.

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Good luck

They really need to hire some artsy design weirdos at Google if they want to stand a chance. I like the simplicity of their basic site but everything is fairly ugly from their docs through gmail. 

Also, internally, different software groups members follow other members using their "buzz". So, some frickin idiot thinks "let's do that for everyone ... automatically". Let's see: I email students about research problems, my old Grad school buds about that those LSD experiments, my parents about their health, my kids about the homework and various business people about various business projects.  Yea sure I want all these people mashed up together following my "feed"!  That's the biggest WTF?! I've ever seen.

Given that track record, my bet is on facebook ... it is really stupid about how to categorize "friend" too, but it grew up organically that way and so everyone there puts on an act. 

I do have use for something like Wave though ... and now it's "bip" gone.  It was not communicated well, and their slow beta invites put me to sleep waiting until I forgot all about it.  Hire some real product designers, preferably who can barely program. Steve Jobs is a nut, but where would phones be without him?

US enemployment facing full-blown crisis?

The Horror Show

The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week’s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.

By BOB HERBERT

The employment data for July, released by the government on Friday, showed that private employers added just 71,000 jobs during the month and that the unemployment rate remained flat at 9.5 percent. But as bad as those numbers were, if you look beyond them you’ll see a horror show.

Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary Census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most ominous long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force.

With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.

Charles McMillion, the president and chief economist of MBG Information Services in Washington, is an expert on employment and has been looking closely for years at the issue of labor force participation. “Over the past three months,” he said, “1,155,000 unemployed people dropped out of the active labor force and were not counted as unemployed. Even ignoring population growth, if these unemployed had not dropped out of the labor force, simple arithmetic shows that the official unemployment rate would have risen from 9.9 percent in April to 10.2 percent in July, rather than — as it has — fallen to 9.5 percent.”

Because of normal growth in the working-age population, the labor force increases by roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people per month. If those folks were factored in, said Mr. McMillion, “unemployment now would be even higher than 10.2 percent.”

We are not even beginning to cope with this crisis, which began long before the onset of the so-called Great Recession. The economy is showing absolutely no sign of countering the nation’s staggering jobs deficit.

“We have a large number of people who have just given up hope of finding a job,” said Mr. McMillion. He pointed out that there are record numbers — “I mean lights-out record numbers” — of long-term unemployed people who are still looking for jobs. Of the 14.6 million men and women officially counted as unemployed, nearly 45 percent have been out of work for six months or longer.

The Times’s Michael Luo wrote a moving article last week about the people who have started calling themselves the “99ers,” meaning they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks and thus have exhausted the absolute maximum in unemployment benefits. Nearly a million and a half people have been out of work for at least 99 weeks — and not all of them qualified for jobless benefits.

Said Mr. McMillion: “When you combine the long-term unemployed with those who are dropping out and those who are working part-time because they can’t find anything else, it is just far beyond anything we’ve seen in the job market since the 1930s.”

They may be thinking about this in Washington, but they sure aren’t doing much about it. The politicians’ approach to the jobs crisis has been like passing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Millions are suffering and the entire economy is being undermined, and what are they doing? They’re appropriating more and more money for warfare while schizophrenically babbling about balancing the budget.

At some point we’re going to have to claw our way out of this denial. With 14.6 million people officially jobless, and 5.9 million who have stopped looking but say they want a job, and 8.5 million who are working part time but would like to work full time, you end up with nearly 30 million Americans who cannot find the work they want and desperately need.

We’ve got more and more people in our working-age population and fewer and fewer jobs to go around. Mr. McMillion tells us that there are now 3.4 million fewer private-sector jobs in the U.S. than there were a decade ago. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the worst job creation record since 1928 to 1938.

We’re not heading toward the danger zone. We’re there. The U.S. will not remain a stable society if this great employment crisis is not addressed head-on — and soon. You cannot allow joblessness on this scale to fester. It’s wrong, and the blowback will be as destructive and intolerable as it is inevitable.

David Brooks is off today.

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New technique announced to turn windows into power generators

August 10, 2010 Enlarge

Images depicting the inside of the deposition chamber were taken when scientists were depositing the insulating film. The different colors are due to the different gases being used. Credit: Prof. Chris Binns, University of Leicester

 

An international team of scientists and industrialists is to meet at the University of Leicester to develop of a revolutionary new technique for harnessing green energy.

Norwegian company EnSol AS has patented a ground breaking, novel thin film solar cell technology which they seek to develop commercially by 2016.

The company is now working with experts in the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy to develop the revolutionary new type of solar cell material that could be coated as a thin film on, for example, windows in buildings to produce power on a large scale.


Enlarge

Images depicting the inside of the deposition chamber were taken when scientists were depositing the insulating film. The different colors are due to the different gases being used. Credit: Prof. Chris Binns, University of Leicester

Experts will meet at the University from August 10- 11 to officially launch the collaboration between EnSol AS and the University of Leicester.

Professor of Nanotechnology at the University of Leicester, Professor Chris Binns, said the collaboration offered a tremendous opportunity to develop a new method for harnessing solar energy:

"The material has been designed by EnSol AS and is based on nanoparticles that can be synthesised in Leicester. In fact, following some initial investment by the company, the equipment we have here at the University of Leicester is uniquely suited in the world to produce small amounts of the material for prototypes

"The work is important since the solar cells are based on a new operating principle and different to Si solar cells. One of the key advantages is that it is a transparent thin film that can be coated onto window glass so that windows in buildings can also become power generators. Obviously some light has to be absorbed in order to generate power but the windows would just have a slight tinting (though a transmission of only 8-10% is common place for windows in the "sun belt" areas of the world) . Conversely the structural material of the building can also be coated with a higher degree of absorption. This could be side panels of the building itself, or even in the form of "clip-together" solar roof tiles.


Enlarge

Images depicting the inside of the deposition chamber were taken when scientists were depositing the insulating film. The different colors are due to the different gases being used. Credit: Prof. Chris Binns, University of Leicester

"Also since it is a thin film that can be coated onto large areas it could become very much cheaper than conventional devices.

"Photovoltaics are destined to form a key power generating method as part of a low carbon economy and the new technology will bring that a stage closer."

The material is composed of metal nanoparticles (diameters ~ 10 nm) embedded in a transparent composite matrix..

A spokesperson for EnSol AS said: "The basic cell concept has been demonstrated, and it will be the objective of this research and development project to systematically refine this PV cell technology to achieve a cell efficiency of 20% or greater.

"A thin film deposition system with nanoparticle source, will be designed and constructed in collaboration with the University of Leicester for the fabrication of prototype cells based on this design.

"This experimental facility will be designed to produce PV cells with an active area in excess of 16 cm2 (40 mm x 40 mm) deposited onto standard glass substrates. These prototype cells will subsequently be characterised and tested in collaboration with our academic partners.

"EnSol's next generation PV cell technology has tremendous potential for industrial scale, low environmental impact, cost effective production via standard "spray on" techniques."
Provided by University of Leicester (news : web)

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Attributes of a leader

By WINNIE YEOH
winnie@thestar.com.my

BESIDES diligence and thrift, there are other attributes that can propel certain personalities to the top.

According to Oriental Holdings Berhad chief executive officer and managing director (property/plantation) Datuk Lim Su Tong, such attributes are not exclusive to only a certain of group of people.

His company is part of the Boon Siew Group and Lim is the son-in-law of the late Penang tycoon Tan Sri Loh Boon Siew, the man acclaimed for being the first to import Honda motorcycles into Malaysia in the 1950s.

Lim was delivering a keynote address titled ‘The Attributes of An Illiterate’ during the YMCA Toastmasters Club of Penang’s 25th anniversary at the Bayview Hotel Georgetown recently.

Portrait of a tycoon: An old picture of Loh testing a Honda motorbike. 

 

“Even an illiterate (referring to Loh) can humbly seek and use such skills.

“I worked for 25 years with him. I had the privilege and opportunity to observe his attributes,” he said.

Lim said his father-in-law was knowledgeable, trustworthy, sincere and caring. He also had a passion to lead.

“Loh migrated to Penang from China at a young age. While other children had the opportunity to enjoy their childhood, he had to go through the university of hard knocks.

“The young boy had to make a living and he chose to work as an apprentice mechanic although the salary was lower than that of other manual jobs.

“With his acquired knowledge, he was able to start related businesses.
“Later in life, the knowledge enabled him to procure a franchise for motor vehicles,” Lim told an attentive audience.

He said although his father-in-law was an illiterate, he would listen attentively to the professionals and emulate the management skills of the franchiser.

“He engaged professionals to run his business and thus, his businesses expanded.

“His trustworthiness was also a key to his success. He was humble in explaining business plans to his partners although he was the major shareholder.

“His partners trusted him and would leave it to him to make the business decisions.

“Hence directors’ meetings were only a formality and more like a form of fellowship for them,” he said.

He added that Loh also implemented incentive policies based on the performances of his workers.

“He was a careful and decisive man. Before committing to a new project, he would study all the details with care and passionately explain its prospects to us,” he said.

“Those attributes of his inspired us to ensure that his projects were successful. His leadership footprints are still visible in our corporate endeavours today.”

As for Lady Luck, Lim said sometimes she was around to help Loh and his partners but not always.

America Goes Dark

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times  By PAUL KRUGMAN 

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

PAUL KRUGMAN

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.

And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.

In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around.

But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed.

And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn.

America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. 

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Half a million Malaysians banned from leaving country, PTPTN loan an emotional strain on grad

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Half a million Malaysians banned from leaving country

By IWAN SHU-ASWAD SHUAIB
iwan@thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: About half a million Malaysians have been banned from leaving the country.

The 424,653 persons have been blacklisted mainly for defaulting in tax payments, not paying educational loans and also for being declared bankrupts.

Those blacklisted include high profile individuals carrying titles of Tan Sri, Datuk Seri and Datuk.

> The Insolvency Department has the bulk of those blacklisted, with 196,473 persons (46%) declared bankrupt;
> The blacklist comes from 13 government agencies, which also includes the Inland Revenue Board and the Immigration Department;

> The youngest person blacklisted is just 25.

Related Story:
VIPs and celebs placed in travel blacklist

PTPTN loan an emotional strain on grad

I AM a recent graduate with a huge PTPTN loan hanging over my head before I can even get a headstart in the working world. My total loan amount was RM48,000. From the time I started working, I have been paying small amounts based on what I can afford but unfortunately, what I can afford is not even close to the so-called administration fees.

My opening balance for this year (after paying a chunk last year using my graduation reward cash from relatives) was RM46,964.94. On Aug 6, when I checked on my account transaction history in PTPTN’s E-FES, I was startled to see a closing balance of RM47,054.51, which is RM89.57 more than my opening balance of the year.

This would be all right if I had not made any repayment. However, from January to July, I paid RM714.94. Instead of a reduction in my balance, to my utter disbelief, PTPTN charged RM804.51 as administration fee for that same period of time.

Coming from a fresh graduate who is not even earning above RM1,900 (after EPF deductions), living in Kuala Lumpur and travelling to the city centre for work, this has put a strain on my financial and emotional health.

Recently, a report mentioned that almost half a million people have defaulted on their PTPTN loans. 
Discounting the ungrateful ones who have the money but refused to pay, those like me who are struggling to pay have been mercilessly burdened by PTPTN. During my study years, my parents often had to come up with the cash first and there were so many semesters when many of us would be barred from examinations because PTPTN had not banked in the money before the due date. There would be a long queue of students trying to get “unbarred” when the time taken could have given us more study time, reduced stress and emotional turmoil before the examination.

The administration fee imposed by PTPTN is ridiculous. Sooner or later, I may have to default on my loan, not because I don’t want to pay it but because I can’t afford to pay.

PTPTN PRISONER,
Subang Jaya

Monday December 27, 2010

200,000 borrowers default on student loan repayments

TEMERLOH: More than 200,000 out of 1.75 million National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) borrowers have defaulted on their loans.

The loan defaulters are considered hard-core borrowers who made no effort to repay their dues even if they manage to gain employment, said PTPTN chairman Datuk Ismail Mohamad Said.

He added these defaulters also didn’t take the initiative to consult the corporation to re-schedule their repayments if they have yet to enter the job market.

Ismail said the corporation had given out RM37bil in study loans since 1997 to 1.8 million students.
“PTPTN was supposed to receive RM5bil in arrears according to its repayment schedule, but only RM2.1bil has been returned so far.

“Some borrowers are already employed but they still refuse to pay up.

“Once the Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Nasional Act 1997 is amended, we will start making mandatory monthly deductions from the borrowers’ salaries next year,” he said after presenting school bags and study awards to about 200 pupils from the Kuala Krau parliamentary constituency here on Friday.

Ismail said the amendments, if passed, will give the Inland Revenue Board the power to deduct the salaries of errant borrowers.

“Errant borrowers will be blacklisted and can be taken to court if they still don’t respond to notices to repay their study loans,” Ismail said.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the PTPTN has written off RM59mil worth of study loans granted to 2,162 graduates who obtained first class degrees for the first seven months of this year.

Hurd's HP legacy: Dell racer, IBM chaser

Man executing on another's plan

By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Get more from this author

Somewhere in California, Carly Fiorina must nearly have choked to death from laughter while stumping for a US Senate seat as news of her successor's sudden departure broke following a sexual-harassment probe.

It has not been an easy five years for Mark Hurd, the former president, chief executive officer, and chairman of HP, the largest IT vendor in the world. Hurd, who took over as CEO in the wake of the topsy-turvy reign of Carly Fiorina in 2005, came in from staid NCR and made HP a little more predictable, financially. Something Wall Street and HP customers alike wanted very much.

The tough tasks of making the HP-Compaq merger work in a radically changing, post-dot-com IT environment and building up HP's software and services business — goals set by Fiorina shortly after she came into HP from the outside as president in 1999 — fell to Hurd.

Fiorina tried and failed to buy the IT consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers, eventually eaten by IBM. HP under Hurd recovered from that mistake by eating EDS in May 2008 for $13.9bn.

Over the past five years, Hurd can take credit for an improved PC business, a steady printer and consumables business, and a rationalized and growing server business where HP is now both the shipment and revenue leader. The expansive plan to turn HP into a real IT player might have been all Fiorina flair, but the execution — done with a magnifying glass, sharp pencil, and a pair of pliers — was pure Hurd.

Hurd had a reputation as a tough cost-cutter when he ran NCR, and he didn't soften any when he left Dayton, Ohio in 2005 for Palo Alto, California.

Soon after taking over as CEO in the spring of 2005, Hurd cut 10 per cent of the workforce, or 15,200 people. And in the wake of the EDS acquisition, 24,600 jobs got put on the block, and Hurd pressed for voluntary pay cuts for employees in Europe while at the same time raking in $24.2m in compensation for himself. In 2008, Hurd took in $33.9m.

HP could — and did — immediately cut pay in February 2009 by between five and 15 per cent for employees in the US during the economic meltdown. Hurd took a 20 per cent pay cut, just to show he was one of the boys. But Hurd was not hurting for cash — certainly not enough to fudge his expense reports, which is one of the reasons why he was forced to resign.

A year after Hurd came on board, HP wrested control of the desktop PC business back from archrival Dell, and a year later HP took the market-share lead for notebooks. As HP was managing to get its act together in the PC business, Dell was busy selling PCs it knew were crap and doing everything it could to keep the bags of cash coming in from Intel. Predictably, Dell's business suffered as much from its own missteps as it did from HP's resurgence.

By the math, the merged HP and Compaq should have immediately been the king of servers in terms of revenues, topping Big Blue — a feat no one had ever accomplished in the history of the systems business.

But the HP-Compaq systems merger coincided with a radical shift away from big and expensive proprietary and Unix machines and towards cheaper boxes running Unix and Linux, so it took considerably longer than planned for HP to catch up to and topple IBM.

But thanks to IBM's revenue dropping because of mainframe and Power Systems transitions and x64-based servers rebounding, HP finally bested IBM in server revenues in the first quarter of this year — nearly a decade after the Compaq deal was announced.

It's very unlikely that this will hold in the fourth quarter, when IBM should post some impressive mainframe and Power Systems sales. But anything goes for 2011, and the safe money is on HP maintaining and extending its lead on IBM in the server racket.

It will take considerably longer — how does infinity sound? — for HP's services business to catch up with Big Blue's. In its fiscal 2009 ended in October last year, HP had sales of $114.6bn, but services were only $8.9bn of that.

IBM, by contrast, had sales of $103.6bn in calendar, but $58.9bn of that was for services. And yes, Fiorina was right: HP should have bought that PwC consulting business, which generated $19.6bn in sales for Big Blue in calendar 2009.

Lesjak in charge - for now

Now, Cathie Lesjak, who has been HP's chief financial officer since January 2007, has been handed the reins that were yanked out of Hurd's hands by the HP board of directors. That's just as what happened to Bob Wayman, HP's long-time CFO, who was handed the reins to become interim CEO when the board gave Fiorina the bounce in 2005 and began the search that resulted in Hurd being brought over from NCR. Lesjak has already said she will not do the CEO job.

Lesjak will be in charge of reporting HP's financials on August 19 all by her lonesome, something she was no doubt not expecting. To try to soothe a jumpy Wall Street, HP released preliminary financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended in July.

The company said revenues would be between $32.5bn and $32.7bn and earnings per share would come in at between $1.03 and $1.05. HP expects revenues for the full fiscal 2010 to be $125.3bn and $125.5bn, with EPS of $3.62 to $3.64. Those are some pretty tight numbers, and they show just how confident HP is in its business.

As for Hurd, there's always politics. ®

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• HP's Hurd quits quickly on sexual harassment probe (6 August 2010)
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