Business Tech

Shares of Dell and Qualcomm plunged by double digits Monday, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average went into a free-fall of nearly 700 points on news that the economy is officially in a recession.

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

The Dow closed down 679.95 points, or 7.7 percent, to end the day at 8,149.09, breaking a five-day run at posting gains.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell further, declining 8.95 percent, or 137.50 points, to end at 1,398.07. And the CNET Tech Index dropped 7 percent to 1,014.20.

Despite reports that retailers fared better than expected over Black Friday, PC maker Dell saw its shares give up 10 percent during the regular trading session to close at $10.05 a share.

Shares of Qualcomm dropped nearly 10.8 percent to $29.96 a share at the session's close, and Comcast stumbled 10.9 percent to end the day at $15.45 a share.

SimpleDB, one of Amazon.com's suite of online services that people can use to build Web sites or other computing operations, is out of private beta testing.

The service lets programmers store database records at Amazon and extract specific data from them. Along with the shift to public beta testing, Amazon cut the price for storing data from $1.50 to 25 cents per gigabyte per month.

SimpleDB, introduced nearly a year ago, is a newer arrival into the Amazon Web Services suite. Other services let customers process data, store raw data, distribute content, and store messages sent among different computers.

The company also announced basic level of use is free for at least six months--the first time the company has done so with one of its Web services. After various thresholds are met in data transfer and computer processing, customers must pay according to usage.

"We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 500MB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine-hours each month. You can transfer 1GB of data in, and another 1GB out," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog posting Monday.

Among those using SimpleDB are Pluribo, Issuu, and MyMiniLife.com, Amazon said.

To make SimpleDB easier to use, Amazon said it plans to release a new interface similar to the SQL (Structured Query Language) widely used in databases today. It also plans a mechanism to let people more easily upload multiple items.

Black Friday wasn't as disastrous as many feared (except, of course, for the poor Wal-Mart employee trampled to death by impatient shoppers).

As far as sales go, overall, the retail industry did get a slight boost. The National Retail Federation counted 172 million shoppers visiting Web sites and brick-and-mortar stores between Thanksgiving and the following Sunday, which is up from 147 million last year. In total, the NRF expects holiday sales to rise 2.2 percent this year to $470.4 billion.

But it's tough to say whether today, known as Cyber Monday, will prove as promising for retailers. In fact, this has been one of the hardest holiday sales seasons to predict in years, according to retail analysts, since the current economic recession is wreaking havoc on consumer confidence.

Cyber Monday is traditionally the day online retailers push as the best day for holiday deals. So far, analysts are mixed as to what to expect when the last order is placed at midnight tonight.

"We certainly saw Black Friday had some surprising bright spots. But we saw buying start to fall off Saturday and Sunday," said John Squire, chief strategy officer for online retail tracking service Coremetrics. "We're going to hesitate in suggesting Cyber Monday will be as shiny as Black Friday."

Early Monday, traffic to the retail Web sites his company follows and the number of orders placed or started were down 10 percent compared with the same time last year, Squire said. Of course, he cautioned, the day is not over. The final tally won't be ready until Tuesday.

Cyber Monday has typically proved to be an accurate measure of the overall shopping season, according to ComScore. Though individual year-over-year growth rates for online spending each day varies throughout the holiday sales season, during the past few years Cyber Monday has been within a few percentage points of the final holiday season growth rate.

But many people have already done their shopping online. ComScore on Sunday reported that online, nontravel retail sales on the Friday after Thanksgiving reached $534 million. That's up from the same day a year ago, but just barely--online retail sales rose just 1 percent, from $531 million.

So will online shoppers come out again and respond to the aggressive deals being offered today? Again, it's tough to say due to the volatile economy, and the competing influences on consumer spending, Gian Fulgoni, chairman of ComScore, said in a statement.

But even if Cyber Monday doesn't bring in the sales retailers were hoping for, all is not lost. Typically, while the Monday after Thanksgiving produces the first sales spike for online sales, it's not the biggest spike.

That will likely be two weeks from today, Monday, December 15, according to Ken Cassar, an analyst with Nielsen Online.

For the past three years, the third Monday following Thanksgiving was the function of two factors. "It's a Monday, and Mondays are the most heavily trafficked days of the week as people get back to work. And it's the Monday that's closest to Christmas without being dangerously close as far as shipping goes," he said.

Overall, the calendar could actually be the industry's ally for the rest of this year.

Though Thanksgiving was later this year, Christmas will fall on a Thursday, which gives consumers two more days of online shopping with guaranteed shipping this year than last, when Christmas was on a Tuesday.

Because of that, Squire of Coremetrics says that in addition to December 15, the following Tuesday and Wednesday will be big days too, since those often offer the last chance for free shipping from retailers.

"That's usually the last big spike of online buying," he said. "Expectations are we'll see that again."

But how big of a spike is relative. Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, said Black Friday provided a welcome bump in sales from what had been shaping up to be a "weak" November for his company. But Cyber Monday and beyond should be better.

At Overstock.com, Byrne said, "We'll be happy if we end up anywhere near zero percent growth."

Google has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the open-source Web browser operates.

And guess what? Google's dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

The Chrome extensions document, spotlighted Saturday by Google programmer Aaron Boodman, doesn't include a timeline, but it does shed light on why the project is a priority for Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome.

"Chromium can't be everything to all people," according to the document. "User-created extensions have been proposed to solve these problems: the addition of features that have specific or limited appeal; users coming from other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can't live without; bundling partners who would like to add features to Chromium specific to their bundle."

When Google launched Chrome three months ago, it promised a Chrome extensions framework. Extensions are a popular feature of Chrome's most likely rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and one very popular extension is AdBlock Plus.

And AdBlock makes a specific appearance on the list of extension uses that Google said it would like to support eventually:

• Bookmarking/navigation tools: Delicious Toolbar, StumbleUpon, Web-based history, new tab page clipboard accelerators.

• Content enhancements: Skype extension (clickable phone numbers), RealPlayer extension (save video), Autolink (generic microformat data--addresses, phone numbers, etc.)

• Content filtering: AdBlock, Flashblock, privacy control, parental control

• Download helpers: video helpers, download accelerators, DownThemAll, FlashGot

• Features: ForecastFox, FoxyTunes, Web Of Trust, GooglePreview, BugMeNot

Demand for extensions is real.

In an unscientific CNET News poll about why people don't use Chrome, about 19 percent pointed to the lack of an extensions feature. And on Google's issue tracking site for Chromium, a Chrome extensions feature is the top-requested item.

"Of all the Firefox plug-ins, this is the one essential one," said Firefox user Ole Eichhorn. "Chrome is faster until you factor in all the cruft that gets downloaded as ads, then it isn't faster anymore. When Chrome supports AdBlock, it will be the winner, but until it does, Firefox is the only choice."

In its document, Google described some of its goals for Chrome extensions. The extensions should silently update, just like Chrome does. They should be isolated for security reasons and only get access to resources it's entitled to use. Installation should be easy, taking only two clicks.

They should permit rich user interface options--rich enough to implement some parts of Chrome as extensions, Google said. Among the interface options should be "toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or AdBlock-like functionality)," Google said. Some interfaces will require the user to grant specific permissions, such as "access to the history database" or "access to mail.google.com," Google said.

Google will play a major role in extensions, providing a central service that can be used to issue updates and to blacklist "malicious or harmful extensions" so the browser won't use them.

"It's likely in the future we may want to provide a consumer front-end which would allow users to more easily find the most popular, highest quality and trustworthy extensions," Google also said.

Update 2:03 p.m. PST: Added NPD and Apple paragraphs.

Black Friday proved to be a relatively bright light in an economy largely characterized by dark, gloomy reports.

Overall, retail sales for the day after Thanksgiving were up 3 percent from the same day in 2007, with preliminary estimates putting total sales in the U.S. at $10.6 billion, according to Shoppertrak RCT. (Shoppertrak derives its retail benchmark from a wide range of categories, including consumer electronics, sporting goods, apparel, and general merchandise.)

On Black Friday, the Wii had the right touch.

(Credit: GameSpot)

Web shopping saw an even larger percentage gain for the day, with traffic up 11 percent year over year, per comparison shopping site PriceGrabber.com.

Taking the crown as the top product of the day was the Nintendo Wii, according to both PriceGrabber and online commerce giant eBay, which pulled data from its namesake site and other eBay-owned sites including PayPal and Shopping.com.

The Wii game console was the most searched-for product on eBay, followed by the Wii Fit companion product. Consumers snatched up 3,171 Wiis over eBay, at an average selling price of $349, followed by the Wii Fit, with 1,059 sold at an average selling price of $140.

Market watchers pointed out that, in the dire economy of 2008, online shoppers and consumers generally were likely motivated by widespread discounting by anxious sellers.

"Consumers are responding to aggressive promotions and price drops on popular electronics," Ron LaPierre, president of PriceGrabber, said in a statement.

The NPD Group offered a similar assessment from the retail front lines on Friday:

The overall initial conclusion for Black Friday is that sales and traffic were strong, likely on par with prior years. Consumers were drawn by the appearance of bargains and low prices and electronics are increasingly the primary driver of consumers' interest in Black Friday shopping.

According to PriceGrabber, the following were the most popular products on Black Friday--nine of the 10 are gadgets, with the odd product out being one styling of the popular Ugg boots:

• Nintendo Wii console
• Ugg Australia "classic short" boot
• Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray disc player
• Samsung LN52A650 52" LCD TV
• Nintendo Wii Fit
• Panasonic TH-42PX80U 42" plasma TV
• Sennheiser HD 555 headphones
• Canon EOS Rebel XSi Black SLR digital camera kit
• Acer Aspire One AOA110-1295 notebook PC
• Canon PowerShot A590 IS black digital camera

The consumer electronics category that saw the largest gains from Black Friday 2007 was Blu-ray/HD-DVD players, up 147 percent, according to PriceGrabber. Headphones were up 103 percent. (By comparison, women's sleep and lounge wear was up 415 percent, women's boots were up 203 percent, and watches were up 202 percent.)

On eBay's Shopping.com, a GPS sold every 9 minutes and an MP3 player every 11 minutes. On eBay proper, the hottest products in those categories were the Garmin Nuvi GPS and the iPod Touch music player.

Apple seemed to have had a good Black Friday. Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog reported Sunday that on Amazon.com, 10 of the 25 bestselling electronics products (including three of the top 10) were Apple products, led by the iPod Touch. The Fortune report also said that by Sunday the iPod Touch had fallen to No. 4, with Amazon's own Kindle moving into first.

Despite the good returns from Black Friday, no one seemed eager to predict continued economic cheer through the rest of the holiday season.

"While this is an encouraging start for retailers, there's no guarantee these deep discounts will continue after Black Friday weekend, which could slow spending," Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, said in a statement. "Additionally, consumers have just 27 days to shop this year as opposed to 32 in 2007, which may catch some procrastinating consumers off guard, leading to lower sales levels."

q&a Microsoft Dynamics CRM has become a key product for the company, according to CRM division general manager Brad Wilson--and it's an area the software maker plans to invest in further.

According to Wilson, when Microsoft earlier this year committed itself to investing $1 billion annually in the construction of new data centers to support the Microsoft Live portfolio of on-demand software, some of that sum--he declined to specify how much--was earmarked for customer relationship management.

Brad Wilson is CRM division general manager at Microsoft.

(Credit: Microsoft )

Earlier this month, CNET News sister site ZDNet UK spoke to Wilson to find out how he intends to make that CRM investment and whether he thinks it will be sufficient to beat on-demand CRM leader Salesforce.com on its own turf. Wilson made it plain that, despite the SME (small and medium enterprise) bias that Microsoft CRM may have acquired, it is equally aimed at the enterprise.

Q: Microsoft has been in CRM for some time, but just how long?
Wilson: We've been in the CRM market for five and a half years, and have more than 16,000 CRM customers and more than 750,000 users.

Microsoft is investing more annually on data centers than the complete revenue of all the on-demand players--$1 billion annually. As a company, we are investing heavily.

How is that customer base made up?
Wilson: More than half of the business is international--outside the U.S.--and, although we started out as an organization focused mainly on the small and medium-sized businesses, more than half of our revenue now comes from large enterprises.

Salesforce.com is very popular, so how do you compete with it?
Wilson: We do and we have people who switch from Salesforce.com fairly routinely. But there are a number of companies that compete in this space and everyone wins some and everyone loses some.

What I like about our strategy is that Salesforce.com has a single operating model, which is that you rent it from them forever. Our software comes with a choice of either having an on-demand subscription offering or buying the software. If you talk to analysts today, they will tell you that, of all the CRM in use throughout the world, probably about 90 percent is deployed on the premises.

We want to give our customers the choice. Whether you want to go on-premises or to a cloud-based offering, the choice is yours.

Does this mean you don't find the cloud particularly valid?
Wilson: It is not so much that--and this is a somewhat controversial view--but I don't really care. I have an agnostic model: if you want to buy the CRM software, great; if you want to go ahead with on-demand, that's also great.

For us, it is a single codebase. It's literally the same software running.

There is no difference between on-premise or on the network. The only difference is how long your network cable is. I think sometimes people get too caught up in it. The world is not really binary.

What new products are coming up?
Wilson: About 11 months ago, we shipped our CRM 4.0, which is a fully multi-tenanted system that you can deploy from outside the cloud.

What we announced (earlier this month) is a new set of accelerators for CRM 4.0 (on sale December 1). These are extensions to the core system so that, when you add them to CRM 4.0, they offer capabilities such as e-service for handling Web cases. This lets customers submit cases online and check things such as status very easily.

What do you mean exactly by "cases"?
Wilson: Well, if you have a broken fridge and you want to contact the retailer or manufacturer, then you can go to the Web site and that will submit information that will flow into the CRM system and then trigger a workflow.

So e-service is really that Web interface to customer services, as opposed to the call center. What we provide is the data and the workflow to support e-service scenarios.

Another one is extended sales forecasting, which is a way to lock and manage forecasts that goes deeper than the usual sales-automation facilities.

There are new analytics in business intelligence; sales methodologies. And then there is enterprise search integration through SharePoint.

But are these new?
Wilson: We talked about them at our partner conference back in July in Houston but...we haven't had a customer launch before (this month).

So presumably these are intended to deal with the view that Microsoft has not been in the CRM market very long and that, to understand and execute sophisticated CRM, you need a specialist supplier?
Wilson: The wildly less popular ones? The ones that have had staggering adoption problems over the past 10 years? I think there is really a philosophical difference (between Microsoft and those suppliers). We are not going to give you a gigantic list of features. You know how you want to run your business.

So, for us, user adoption is key. If they (the users) are not going to use the system, you are pretty much guaranteed a failed deployment.

We give you enough flexibility so that you can run the system how you want to. So I find we will beat a classic offering from your CRM vendors on end-user adoption and platform flexibility. Those factors will far outweigh the fact that other people have more prebuilt stuff.

We went into a sales opportunity against a classic CRM vendor and measured its software. Out of the box, its software had only a 7 percent fit (only 7 percent of the software could be run without modification).

When you think about it, it is very difficult to sit in Palo Alto...and design something that is going to fit any business--a system that will work with every business in the world, whether it is in Turkey or South Africa. So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need?

I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone.

At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better.

So are these products free?
Wilson: Yes.

But you are charging people for the software.
Wilson: You have to buy the core license but, once you have bought it, we are not going to try and nickel and dime people for bits of process and functionality. We don't believe in that.

We are taking the approach of wanting to make CRM much more affordable. Affordable in terms of TCO (total cost of ownership).

Part of that is in the core. We think we've done a pretty good job there and we keep adding pieces of incremental value through the accelerators. Even in the on-demand space, we want to go in and make it more affordable. CRM in on-demand tends to be relatively overpriced. So we want to make that price come down.

How do you charge? It is on a license basis?
Wilson: We have a server price and a user price--what we call a server license and a client-access license. The server price is nominal, relatively low and doesn't tend to go up. The primary driver of price is how many people use it.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

The Netbook, take two: When Advanced Micro Devices said it wasn't going to focus on Netbooks, as Intel and its partners defined them, maybe it was on to something.

Intel is re-evaluating the Netbook market as possibly not The Next Big Thing. This from the company that makes the Atom processor and accompanying silicon that go into most of the Netbooks sold today.

HP Mini Netbook 1030NR: the next big thing?

(Credit: Best Buy)

At a recent Raymond James IT Supply Chain Conference (streamed via this Intel page), Stu Pann, vice president in the sales and marketing group at Intel, said his company sees the Netbook differently now.

"We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market," he added.

And the most revealing statement? "If you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size--it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

Though this may simply reaffirm some people's view of the Netbook, it may also be surprising to others who thought the Netbook was potentially a laptop replacement for highly mobile users looking for a lightweight design. Or at least a design that was bearable beyond one hour.

Enter AMD and its take on the market. Though it won't resist if computer makers use its upcoming Huron and Conesus CPUs (one of these is due early next year) for Netbook-like designs, its focus is on ultrathin laptops similar in build to the 13-inch MacBook Air (and even 14-inch designs) but at a much lower price point.

AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer said earlier this month that "we're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor." And Bahr Mahony, director of notebook product marketing at AMD, said at that time that there are "a fair number of people" who are not satisfied with the experience they're having with Netbooks.

Mahony added that the dissatisfaction with Netbooks "has been exhibited by the high return rates that have been seen on these mini notebooks" in Europe. (AMD uses the terms "Netbook" and "mini notebook" interchangeably.)

AMD believes that the Netbook screen size is too small and the performance disappointing.

The coming year should show whether the Netbook has legs or whether it was just another marketing flash-in-the-pan like the UMPC (ultramobile personal computer) before it.

This post was updated at 3 p.m. PST with information from the earnings call.

EchoStar's loss was TiVo's gain during the third quarter of 2008.

Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo on Tuesday announced it recorded profits of $100.6 million for the quarter, or 98 cents per share, compared with a loss of $8 million for the same quarter a year ago.

The staggering change in fortunes for the DVR maker was due to the patent litigation judgment it won against EchoStar. EchoStar paid TiVo $105 million in damages during the quarter--if it hadn't, TiVo would have reported a net loss of $900,000.

The company's core business continues to fall off.

TiVo signed up 44,000 new subscribers during the quarter, but that's 25 percent fewer than the 69,000 signed up during the third quarter last year. Overall, the company's subscriptions total 3.6 million, compared with the 3.7 million counted at the end of the second quarter of this year.

Money made this quarter from its subscription service, technology, and hardware decreased in each category. Total revenue came in at $64.5 million, down from $75.5 million a year ago.

And the company expects to feel the impact of the financial crisis.

"Though we are pleased with our results this quarter, we recognize that no business is immune to the challenges of the current economic climate, which we expect will adversely affect consumer electronics companies, including TiVo, during the holiday season," said TiVo CEO Tom Rogers on a conference call with investors Tuesday.

The company also addressed the impact of Circuit City's bankruptcy. TiVo won't be directly impacted by the bankruptcy filing, according to new CFO Anna Brunell.

"But the bad news is we'll see less contribution this holiday season from our second-largest retail partner," she said. "That makes what will be a difficult selling season even more difficult."

The company plans to look at more ways to decrease costs, including laying off 7 percent of its workforce, as announced last week.

Looking ahead, TiVo said it's expecting fourth-quarter revenue between $47 million and $49 million, and a net loss of between $10 million and $12 million.

TiVo shares rose more than 1.5 percent to reach $4.50 in after-hours trading Tuesday.

Networking giant Cisco Systems plans to shut down its offices for four days at the end of the year to help save money, according to a research note by UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos.

The company plans to close its offices in the United States and Canada from December 29, 2008, until January 2, 2009. Cisco hopes the shutdown will help save $1 billion in operating expenses.

CEO John Chambers indicated during the company's quarterly conference call earlier this month that Cisco will need to reduce its operating expenses, as it faces a challenging economic environment. Cisco, which sells Internet gear to large corporate customers like banks, has been especially hit during the downturn, as many of its Wall Street customers drastically reduce spending.

During the last economic downturn, many technology companies shut down operations during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day as a way to save operating costs. But this is the first time that Cisco has taken such a step in more than a decade.

"Given the difficult macroeconomic conditions, we believe our cost control focus at this time is appropriate, while still providing our partners and customers with critical services over the holiday period," the company said on its blog explaining the shutdown.

With the overall economy slumping, the tech industry is taking its fair share of hits. We'll keep updating the chart below as news of company changes comes in. See our complete coverage of how the tech sector is faring here: Tracking the tech downturn.

Know of a layoff not listed here? Let us know on this form or e-mail us.

See also: The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring.