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…with relief!

Apparently, six weeks of that was all his family could stand, as he has joined Hyperic (on a part-time basis) to help with its JasperSoft integration. His kids are crying…

Welcome back, Barry. If your kids are like mine, you’ll never leave us for long.

Intel salespeople are now encouraged to spend more time out of the office, talking to PC customers and designers and taking their ideas and concerns back to the mothership. Those customers have rapidly matured; instead of one basic desktop and laptop design for all, they are starting to realize that different people want different things.

When you’re the world’s largest chipmaker, it’s hard to turn on a dime. It can be even harder to admit when you’ve overreached.

Even if they don't want something like the MacBook Air, people now want stylish PCs, not cookie-cutter boxes.

Unfortunately, that only went so far. The platform strategy introduced by Intel CEO Paul Otellini, where Intel provides a pre-ordained set of components to PC makers, eventually showed its limits when it comes to predicting consumer tastes and styles in a changing market.

A shift has taken place at Intel over the last year or so. Once known for dictating the direction of the PC market, Intel is increasingly letting its customers carve their own path. With that subtle yet important change, the PC industry is moving past its Model T era and entering a new world of style and design, where a simple black or gray box won’t do.

That is, until 2005, when Apple announced its decision to switch to Intel’s processors. Suddenly, the rest of the PC industry was on notice: they could no longer dismiss Apple as a sideshow act. Now their products were going to be held up against Apple’s to an even greater degree, and that scared the hell out of several PC companies that had little to no experience in cutting-edge design.

Intel’s product-planning priorities have changed as a result. The Nehalem generation of processors, due in the second half of this year, will be one of Intel’s most complicated launches ever because of the huge variety among different chips.

The most recent and telling example of this shift is the special version of the Core 2 Duo that Intel built at the request of Apple, one of its smallest yet most influential customers. Intel accelerated the development of a much smaller chip packaging technology and lowered the chip’s power consumption, just so Apple could build the MacBook Air.

Intel has done exclusive chips for special customers in the past, but since Sean Maloney took the helm of Intel’s sales and marketing in 2006, the chipmaker is much more willing to find a way to meet the needs and ideas of its PC customers–and to recognize that father doesn’t always know best.

It wasn’t that the strategy itself was flawed: PC makers definitely wanted the combo meal deal, where they could get the processor, chipset, and networking components fully assembled and tested. Even AMD, which for years criticized the idea of restricting “choice,” jumped on board with the platform strategy after acquiring ATI Technologies.

Companies have to make leaps of faith from time to time. Just look at Apple; despite all the risk involved in switching to Intel’s chips, it needed a lower-power chip if it wanted to stay relevant in a computer market where people were demanding laptops. Two years later, that has worked out pretty well.

But sometimes father does know best. Every now and then, you have to tell a customer who comes to you with a request that “no, it can’t be done. And here’s why.” The bet-the-farm strategy can wind up leaving both you and the customer in the lurch if something goes awry.

They are customizing products for various segments and even different geographies, and introducing new designs like Gateway’s all-in-one or Apple’s MacBook Air. That reality makes it harder to dictate a top-down vision for the PC market, since there are now so many different types of customer needs to try to satisfy.

Barcelona, AMD’s first quad-core server processor, was the product of repeated customer requests for an integrated quad-core design, according to AMD executives. Faithful to its customers, AMD set off on building that chip, only to run into problems of nightmare proportions as it realized how “complicated” (in the words of CEO Hector Ruiz) that design would be to complete. Barcelona will ship at least a year later than expected as a result, and Intel cornered the quad-core server market by taking a less elegant but easier and quicker route to market.

These days, Intel is cleverly taking a page from Advanced Micro Devices, the smaller chipmaker that has managed to work the phrase “customer-centric” into just about every press release and public appearance since 2003.

Can Intel walk the fine line between management consultant and flexible supplier? It will be quite the balancing act for one of the world’s largest tech companies, and one that historically at least, is used to pushing rather than pulling.

Just five years ago, the industry worked in a different way. There was little differentiation among PC companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway; everybody was cranking out bulky black desktops that sounded like jetliners or bulky notebooks with desktop processors that got two hours of battery life playing Minesweeper.

Intel has changed a lot in the past decade. The company was left shaken and humbled by its clear misread of the market in the middle of the decade, and has vowed not to let it happen again. The trick now will be avoiding the same trap AMD fell into in 2006 and 2007.

The market became all about price competition, and Dell rose to the top on the strength of its world-class manufacturing and assembly operation in central Texas. In their haste to keep up with Dell, everyone in the PC industry hustled to become lean and mean, and basic research and development into design techniques became a near afterthought.

Earlier on, AMD became a serious player in this business because it listened to server customers who wanted no part of Intel’s Itanium route to 64-bit processing. It came out with Opteron, a much cheaper yet still-powerful chip that preserved backward compatibility with software written for the x86 instruction set, and the rest is history.

That success emboldened Intel. PC companies, trying to recover from the collapse in business spending following the dot-com crash, were eager to cut costs and let Intel and Microsoft spend the money researching new ways to use PCs to grow the size of the market. Intel felt that with its reach, it had a better understanding of the PC market than any one vendor, and the smarts needed to take the industry where it needed to go.

It’s just that at some point, Intel’s ideas stopped resonating with its PC customers, as well as their customers. The Viiv digital home strategy has been a notable failure, as the general public has shown little interest thus far in putting a Windows PC at the center of their entertainment lives. At one point, Dell even forgot that it was supposed to be promoting the brand concept.

Perhaps in return for enjoying a profit margin four times greater than that of its customers, Intel had been the one pushing the leading edge of PC design prior to 2005. It called for standards that would help reduce the costs of building PCs. It cajoled PC makers into adopting more interesting designs with its own set of concept products. And it recognized the growing importance of mobile computing with Centrino, a one-stop shopping experience for PC companies looking to build smaller, thinner notebooks.

(Credit:
Corrine Schulze/CNET Networks)

If you’re like me, your reaction to this news might’ve been, “What? You mean there isn’t a ‘green’ section already?” The New York-based Huffington Post got its start as a liberal answer to the wildly popular Drudge Report news site, and while it’s since branched beyond its political roots, it remains targeted toward a well-educated, left-leaning audience.

The new section of the site is set to launch June 4. Huffington Post representatives said the effort was spearheaded by current Editor-at-large Willow Bay, a TV journalist who currently hosts programs on the Lifetime women’s cable network.

But although it runs sections pertaining to politics, media, entertainment, business, and “living,” as well as a comedy site called 23/6 in conjunction with IAC, there still hadn’t been a section devoted to the unavoidably trendy niche of environmental media. Until now.

“HuffPost Green will focus on eco news and trends–from style and eco-conscious celebrities to green lifestyle tips and the latest scientific findings and expert analysis,” a release from the company explained, hinting that we will likely see photos of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off in addition to the latest grim findings on climate change. “The section will also feature advice on sustainable investing and highlight eco-friendly businesses and sustainable business sectors such as renewable energy, green building, recycling and organics.”

The company announced Wednesday that it will be launching HuffPost Green, a site division specific to “green” content through a content partnership with Discovery Communications’ Planet Green channel as well as TreeHugger, the popular eco-news blog that Discovery acquired last year.

During the keynote at CommunityOne, Ian Murdock, who heads up Sun’s operating system platform strategy, summed it up: “Sun’s goal is to get the technology into as many developer hands as possible. He added, “When you need help scaling …that’s when we make our money.”

Sun generally doesn’t explicitly target Linux as OpenSolaris’ competitive target, but in practice, it’s the chief alternative, and the company hired Linux entrepreneur Murdock to spearhead its OpenSolaris effort, called Project Indiana. With OpenSolaris, Sun hopes to reproduce the success Linux had sneaking into corporate usage through developers’ free downloads.

The conference opened with remarks from Murdock, a brief appearance by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and a panel of open-source experts from Sun and elsewhere discussing the notion of community. Asked what role corporations should play in open-source projects, panel members said paying developers to work on open-source software benefits the larger community, but companies should tread carefully.

“Software projects fail when the company name becomes associated with the project and not the software behind it,” said Jeremy Allison, who who leads SAMBA file-server software work at Google. He also complained about companies that “try and capture a project or start a project and never release it.”

Over the past few years, Sun has opened up its operating system and Java Web development software, as well as begun to embrace other technologies like Java Script, PHP, Linux, and Perl. And with its CommunityOne conference, Sun is reaching out to the developer community like never before.

The move is the latest in Sun’s effort in the better part of a decade to regain relevance in a post-dot-com bust world by transforming into an open source player. Borrowing a trick from Microsoft and its own early successes with Java, Sun has learned that fostering a vibrant developer community, means more apps for your platform, and that theoretically translates into more hardware sales and service contracts, even if the software is free.

SAN FRANCISCO–Sun Microsystems gave developers a gift at the CommunityOne developer conference on Monday–a packaged version of OpenSolaris with a new logo. Now, Sun is hoping developers will return the favor by creating applications to run on the open-source version of its Solaris operating system and thus drive more demand for its servers and software.

“Sun doesn’t need it to be thought of as a commercial success. The trick is is it large enough to be economically interesting and viable and…self-propagating,” he said. “Sun has a pretty good shot at it.”

But now that developers finally have a full-featured open-source operating system package to play with, will they move away from Linux, which is independent and more mature and established?

(CNET News.com’s Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.)

“That’s the $64 billion question,” said Jonathan Eunice, founder and principal IT advisor at Illuminata.

AMD announced Monday it’s working with Sun to make sure OpenSolaris, as well as Sun’s xVM variant of the Xen virtualization software, can take advantage of features in its processors.

Meanwhile, Marten Mickos, senior vice president of Sun’s database group and former chief executive of MySQL, assured the crowd that MySQL will remain open source indefinitely, despite speculation to the contrary.

Disclosure: Stephen Shankland is married to a Tesla Motors employee.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

With the credit crunch spreading from banks with subprime loans to hallowed Wall Street firms and beyond, the U.S. government has been bailing out major companies, notably with an $85 billion loan to insurance giant American International Group. On Thursday, central banks from the United States, Japan, Europe, England, and Switzerland began pumping out money to try to contain the crisis.

“If you dig deep enough, you get heat,” Page said. “We need to make drilling cheaper,” though when Google looked for start-ups trying to reduce the cost of drilling, it found only about 10 people working on the area.

“This is the sixth or seventh cycle I’ve seen in Silicon Valley. I think we’re better positioned than ever,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said of the Silicon Valley region during a meeting with reporters at the company’s headquarters here.

Schmidt added that green and clean technology start-ups are in a business that resembles earlier phases of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–The national and global economy is suffering something between a setback and a meltdown, but Google’s top executives said Wednesday they’re bullish about Silicon Valley’s economic prospects.

Schmidt specifically said the venture capital community is more sophisticated and that a Northern California start-up can reach scale more easily. “Young people out of Stanford and Berkeley–they’re able to get money early. Google is one of a long procession,” he said. “I think it’s completely due to the weather,” he quipped, saying people get hooked on Silicon Valley’s nice climate.

“In general, it’s something we watch closely, but we’ve seen in multiple cycles we’ve gone through (that) as companies get concerned about what they’re spending and how they’re spending, they move toward more accountable platforms,” Armstrong said. “Some companies have shifted even more money to the digital landscape. We have one of the most transparent, accountable models in the digital landscape,” and Google is working to bring its ad system to newspapers, TV, and radio too.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

That’s fine with co-founder Sergey Brin. “The worrisome disease states of Silicon Valley were the bubbles. When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship,” he said. “Tough times bring about the best.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Google co-founder Larry Page

“The company has a very large amount of cash in very, very boring and secure investments. That was the right decision then and especially the right decision now. As a company, we’re fine,” Schmidt said. “The things that could affect us is if it affected our customers…If this debacle caused a huge change in economic situation, that could affect us.”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“Clean tech is a little more like the semiconductor business. The amount of capital required to do it is significantly higher than in the IT (information technology) businesses I’ve been involved with. The economics for clean tech may not be the same as the Google economics. There are higher capital costs, longer supply chains, inventory risks, more manufacturing, and also the need to build that expertise in companies,” Schmidt said. And though manufacturing costs also can be high, science and research can be done in Silicon Valley, and manufacturing elsewhere, as happens with the computer chip business, he added.

“I don’t think there’s anywhere else you’d rather be,” added co-founder Larry Page. “We’re investors in Tesla, for example. It’s pretty amazing you can drive an electric
car with a 220-mile range. Those are produced here. I don’t see those anywhere else in the world.”

Going green and clean
One current reinvention of Silicon Valley is its adoption of green technology such as new solar-panel technology; Google itself has invested in several renewable-energy start-ups. Page pointed specifically to geothermal energy as technology that could help in many areas around the world.

So there are signs of cold feet among the advertisers from which Google gets the vast majority of its revenue? Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce for North America, wouldn’t answer specifically.

There goes another bubble?
Although he’s bullish overall, Schmidt said the current investor excitement around new Internet companies–he deliberately shied away from the term “bubble”–is waning. “There’s clearly some slowdown in Web 2.0,” Schmidt said.

…and it will show up on other social networks, on LivingSocial's own destination site, and hopefully on Google, too.

I expect more social-network app expansion plans that don’t rely exclusively on the social nets. LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said, “We think we’ll be larger, more successful, and provide a better experience if we have both.”

Chief among them is discoverability. LivingSocial is building a database of reviews, and the potential user base for those reviews eclipses the social networks. Burying content inside social networks also doesn’t do great things for search engine optimization. So all content now contributed to the services via social networks will also get presence on the LivingSocial destination sites, which Google and other search engines will be able to index more easily.

There’s no doubt that Facebook and other social networks have served LivingSocial well: The company’s services have 6.4 million users so far, who have posted over 8 million reviews. But building a business that’s beholden to the social-network platforms does have its downsides.

It makes sense for LivingSocial since the service uses the social networks as interfaces into a parallel network of its own users and their content. When you review a product on a LivingSocial site, it’s shared with all LivingSocial users, no matter what network they’re on, as long as they’ve installed the app. (The service uses OpenSocial as its platform for distributing its interface to non-Facebook sites.)

LivingSocial, the parent site for six user review services including ReadingSocial, TuneSocial, and ReelSocial, is announcing two things today: First, a $5 million round of venture funding, which will be used to expand the business. And second, an interesting new strategic twist for the company: a destination Web site. LivingSocial has, to date, relied almost exclusively on its social-network apps and widgets for traffic, so this is a departure.

But this plan makes sense for other services, too. Social-network platforms expose apps to a lot of users, but the open Web has its own benefits. Especially since data can transcend platform, the smart developer should plan to build apps for as many of them as possible.

You know the expression “necessity is the mother of invention?” Well, when people are stressed and forced to seek answers, especially within themselves, that’s when they do some of their best thinking. That’s when they come up with new ideas and new directions.

Years ago, employers began implementing 360 performance reviews, where managers get feedback, not just from their immediate manager, but also from employees, peers, and other managers. The concept is to give managers objective feedback on their performance to help improve their management capability.

Look, when everything’s fine, Microsoft doesn’t have to acquire Yahoo and Yahoo doesn’t have to turn itself around. Apple doesn’t have to bring back Steve Jobs to reignite the company. IBM doesn’t have to hire Lou Gerstner to reposition Big Blue into a service company. Had these companies never looked within themselves, they never would have realized that something needed to change.

But it doesn’t stop there. We don’t even engage ourselves in a dialogue about the gory truth, and for much the same reason. We’re too busy “living.”

In strategic planning and most other strategic processes, we begin with an audit of the company’s situation. We meet with executives, key employees, customers, and analysts to get an internal and external perspective. We collate that into what we hope is an objective snapshot of the company’s competitive position.

It’s no different with people. Think about that the next time somebody asks you how you’re doing.

What’s that, you have a question for me? Why am I asking these inane questions?

Most of the time, those sayings are all well and good. But sometimes, especially when things aren’t going so well, it’s actually a good idea to engage ourselves in a dialogue about how well we’re doing.

I’ve got a question for you: How are you doing? Sure, of course you’re fine. Here’s a follow up: How do you know you’re doing fine? Tougher question, huh?

This kind of thing works for people, too.

We further break that down into what’s called a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. With that and some other tools in hand, we can then plot a new course for the company or modify its existing course. The goal, of course, is to improve the company’s performance, going forward.

The truth is that seemingly simple questions can actually be pretty loaded, so loaded that we’d sometimes rather not know the answer. We have all these sayings about leaving well enough alone. Why upset the apple cart? Why open a can of worms? Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken.

Because, when people ask us how we’re doing, we respond automatically. I’m fine, we’re fine, everything’s fine. After all, if we engaged everyone in a rant about the gory truth, nothing would ever get done.

But you have to get some time away from work, gadgets and all the distractions and get some perspective. If you can’t do it yourself, it sometimes helps to ask friends and loved ones some questions and be willing to truly listen to what they say. Don’t get me wrong; what they say isn’t necessarily going to solve all your problems. But it will get you to think and feel. That’s the key. That’s when you find out how you’re really doing.

Today, Sirius XM has 19.5 million subscribers, which Karmazin said makes it the second-biggest subscriber base in the cable-satellite space behind Comcast, and is slated to keep growing. Sirius cut back its net losses last quarter, its final quarter before the merger. But the downturn in
car sales is making Wall Street and the rest of the world less confident about Sirius’ growth projections.

“The day I joined the company, we had revenues of $67 million, and with revenues of $67 million the company had announced five months before that it had signed Howard Stern for $500 million,” he said.

Sirius XM is in a tight spot. The merger was long and costly, both companies have shelled out extraordinary amounts of money to secure personalities like Howard Stern (who cost $500 million alone), and the credit crunch has dealt a blow to the most lucrative base of new satellite radio subscribers–car buyers. Sirius XM also has to refinance about $1 billion in debt, something else that won’t be easy considering the volatile market.

NEW YORK–He made it past the Federal Communications Commission. But Sirius XM Radio CEO Mel Karmazin now has to deal with Wall Street.

As so many have argued in recent weeks, Karmazin’s mantra was that Wall Street is misguided, myopic even. “You need to make money, and in this particular environment, with Wall Street being what it is today, I think the companies that get rewarded today are companies that have an awful lot of cash flow, that make a great balance sheet. And that’s not us today.”

A typo was corrected: Sirius first pulled in revenue in 2002, not 2022.

In his keynote interview Tuesday at the Media & Money Conference, a joint production of Dow Jones and Nielsen, Karmazin wasn’t in humility mode. “We’re probably one of the top 25 media companies today,” he said of the newly merged Sirius XM, which brought together the world’s only two satellite radio companies. “I think it’s very clear that we will be the most successful company in the audio entertainment industry. I know certainly, as ranked by revenue, we’ll be there soon. Now we just need to grow our free cash flow and demonstrate that.”

Karmazin said that if the auto market does poorly, there will still be millions of new satellite radio subscribers. “(Let’s say) in 2009 there were only 12 million cars sold. That could happen, but no one has forecast that number as low,” he speculated. “Of the 12 million, 6 million will leave the assembly line with satellite radio installed. So that would get us 6 million gross adds, and then there’s a conversion rate. About 50 percent of those people choose to keep satellite radio…That would mean we’re going to add about 3 million new subscribers just from that OEM (original equipment manufacturer) platform.

It was an optimistic pitch to the suit-clad audience, especially considering the widespread belief that satellite radio has been an overpriced, failed experiment.

But the good-ish news? The coming advertising downturn won’t shoot down satellite radio. Karmazin said that between 94 percent and 96 percent of Sirius XM’s revenue comes from monthly subscription fees, not advertising.

Blekko was founded by Rich Skrenta, who founded news aggregation site Topix and co-founded Netscape’s Open Directory Project.

Search engine Blekko, which is so stealthy it doesn’t have a public Web site yet, has raised a second round of funding of $3 million, TechCrunch reported.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interview with Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba’s chief executive, that’s kind of interesting for what it doesn’t say. The article’s headline is “Toshiba’s Plan for Life After HD DVD” and the Q&A appears in the “Boss Talk” column, which seems to put executives in a warm seat rather than a hot seat. By that I mean there are a couple of hard-hitting questions (”Isn’t the loss of the format war a blow to Toshiba’s strategy?), but after you’re through with the piece, you get the feeling that the interviewer, Yukari Iwatani Kane, really let Mr. Nishida off the hook.

Well, without having the question asked, Mr. Nishida did answer in so many words that no Blu-ray player was imminent. He basically said that Toshiba would combat Blu-ray by selling upconverting DVD players that would cost less than Blu-ray players and be just as good. The exact quote: “And we’re going to improve this [upconverting feature] even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images.” That so? Well, what was the point of the war in the first place then? Jeez, Louise.

Anyway, I don’t expect to see a Toshiba Blu-ray player in 2008, but Toshiba may change its tune in 2009. What do you guys think? Can Sony and Blu-ray be beat by cheaper upconverting players? Is DVD still the future?

Picture this: an HD DVD fan’s ultimate nightmare.

Personally, I don’t really care how Mr. Nishida spends his free time, but I am kind of curious what his thought process was when he decided to go to war with Sony. If you remember, over a year ago there was actually a moment when Toshiba and Sony were in negotiations to settle, but in the end they just couldn’t come to an agreement on a unified format. I would have asked Mr. Nishida whether he regrets not making a deal earlier–and why he thought he could win in the first place. I also would have inquired what his plans were for a standalone Toshiba Blu-ray player. I mean, if you’re going to ask him what Toshiba’s plans are for life after HD DVD, you’ve got to ask if a Blu-ray player is in the works–especially a BD-Rom drive for Toshiba’s laptops. Make him answer the question, right?