SiliconBeat

It’s all yours, Steve Ballmer.

The Bud Abbott of Redmond, and perhaps the tech world’s most famous sidekick, has officially taken the reigns of the world’s most important technology company at an auspicious moment. There were plenty of tributes written last week, and over the weekend, to Bill Gates, who officially stepped down from his daily duties at Microsoft on Friday.

And what happens on the first day of the Ballmer show? The company discontinues sales of Windows XP despite the protest of many users who have refused to upgrade to the the new version, Windows Vista. My favorite headline on the mess: “Hasta La Vista, Windows XP.” Read the rest of this entry »

The board at PDL Biopharma, which has sold more than a half billion dollars’ worth of assets to assuage disgruntled investors, has decided to spread some of the cash around. On Friday, the company reported that non-employee directors would get a raise to better compensate for their ongoing efforts “to sell or otherwise monetize” the company’s assets,” including a possible spin-off of some of PDL’s product lines into a separate public company, according to an SEC filing Friday.

Non-employee directors will get an additional Read the rest of this entry »

I’m cross posting this from Matt Nauman’s Green Tech Beat blog:

On Sunday, I wrote a column for the Mercury News called: “What’s the value of a redwood tree? How carbon offsets work in one forest.” In the column, I traced one such carbon offset program from a consumer’s bill to the Lompico Headwaters Forest where the money is being used to preserve trees.

The column generated a fair bit of skeptical reaction in the commenting section. I wanted to post this here to get some other feedback about carbon offsets in general, and the column.

Are these a good economic tool to help the environment? And was my column on the mark, or flawed?

You can post your comments below, or email them to Chris O’Brien
Mercury News Staff Columnist

In a study titled “Who’s Watching the Watchdogs?” that “is likely to be controversial,” Stanford said Monday it has found evidence that “questions the value of the ratings” of all four of the major shareholder advisory firms, according to a press release put out by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, made up primarily of faculty from both the Stanford Law School and its Graduate School of Business.

These firms claim they are “able to predict future performance by performing a detailed analysis encompassing many variables culled from public sources,” according to the release, a claim the study tends to debunk. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, Sigma Designs filed a settlement it has reached of litigation filed against it over claims of stock option backdating, which the company completely denies. Then why is it settling?

“Defendants are entering into this Stipulation solely because the proposed settlement would eliminate the burden and expense of further litigation, and without admitting any wrongdoing or liability whatsoever.”

The agreement, which is subject to court approval, includes the cancellation of an option granted to Sigma’s chief executive in January for Read the rest of this entry »

Shareholder activist and current Yahoo nemesis Carl Icahn felt it necessary to file his blog post of this morning with the SEC as an attachment to his proxy filing offering a rival slate of nominees to serve on Yahoo’s board of directors. If his proxy fight with Yahoo fails, he may at least have a nice list of subscribers to his blog.

Regarding Your Comments on Yahoo

Posted by Carl Icahn June 27, 2008: 10:16 AM

Many of you have been asking me about Yahoo. Please remember I am in the middle of a proxy fight. A proxy fight involves a complicated process of SEC approvals, federal securities laws, filing requirements and a great deal of time and money.

At this time, due to SEC regulations, I do not intend to post your comments regarding the proxy fight. However, I am planning to give you my views about Yahoo and its management shortly. If you wish to be informed I invite you to subscribe. Stay tuned.

Quantum, the San Jose supplier of computer storage products that a decade ago ranked among the ten biggest companies in Silicon Valley, filed its 2008 proxy Friday containing a proposal asking shareholders to approve a reverse stock split. Not a moment too soon, apparently, as its shares hit what looks to be Read the rest of this entry »

If you are an employee at Asyst Technologies and you are reading this, maybe you shouldn’t.

Your boss, Steve Schwartz, sent you a note Wednesday warning that Read the rest of this entry »

We failed to open in a timely manner what seemed like a routine press release from Intuit this afternoon based on the e-mail’s subject line, which seemed to be of the self-promotional variety that come from so many companies: “Intuit Aligns Organization to Invest in Connected Services Strategy”

Little did we know that the “investment” included $22 million the company will spend to lay off 575 employees, or 7 percent of Intuit’s workforce.

Having just gone through our fifth round of layoffs at our own workplace, we are no strangers to management-speak when it comes to getting rid of employees, but our employer has never tried to spin it forward as anything but an economic necessity.

Last September, an “expert” task force of the Department of Homeland Security recommended the establishment of “an integrated operations center” designed to better plan for and respond to disruption on converged voice and data networks in the United States.

But the DHS has so far implemented only one of the three specific coordination recommendations made by its own experts, according to a report Thursday the Government Accountability Office gave to Congress, and doesn’t seem in a hurry to fulfill the other two. Read the rest of this entry »