Microsoft Profits Plummet… 5000 Jobs Shed…. Apple Fanbois Laugh [UPDATED]

You could see this coming a mile away. Microsoft has announced it will cut 5,000 jobs as its  overall profits dropped by 11% this past quarter. Okay, that was less than the 15,000 that was rumored. But it’s still a lot.

But I digress.

These layoffs come despite the fact that revenue was up this past quarter. Apparently 1400 workers will be punted now and the rest will be punted over the next 18 months. This will reduce costs by about $1.5 billion a year. On top of “headcount-related expenses, vendors and contingent staff,” the company will rein in its facilities, capital expenditures and marketing. I mentioned the facilities part of this yesterday, so that should not be a shock to frequent readers of this blog.

Of interest, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent employees an e-mail giving his view on the layoffs:

While this is the most challenging economic climate we have ever faced, I want to reiterate my confidence in the strength of our competitive position and soundness of our approach.

With these changes in place, I feel confident that we will have the resources we need to continue to invest in long-term computing trends that offer the greatest opportunity to deliver value to our customers and shareholders, benefit to society, and growth for Microsoft.

Also of interest, the markets reacted as you would expect. Investors pressed the sell button and as I write this, their stock is down over 10%.

Perhaps laid off Microsoft employees can find jobs at Apple. They don’t seem to be having a problem navigating this rough economy.

UPDATE: Here’s a transcript of the Microsoft con call.

Apple Reports Record Profits For Q1 2009…. See Fanbois, Apple Is Fine Without Steve [UPDATED]

Apple today announced financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. Apple posted record revenue of $10.17 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. In their press release announcing the results, there’ s even a quote from God Steve Jobs:

“Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history—surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

I guess Apple is just fine without Steve.

If you want to listen to the webcast, click here.

UPDATE: Apple stock is up over 7% as of Thursday afternoon.

Seagate Employee Gives The Facts About The Firmware Mess On Slashdot

I took a visit over to Slashdot today and noticed this thread about the firmware circus (click, here, here, and here to catch up if you’ve missed anything). While reading it, I noticed this comment from someone named “Maxtorman” who identified themselves as a Seagate employee (Seagate owns Maxtor just in case you didn’t get the joke behind his name). The comment (assuming it’s true, which I have little doubt that it is) gives an interesting insight to the decision making that went on internally when it came to this firmware. Here’s the important bits that you need to know:

This whole thing started with the 1.5 Terabyte drives. It had a stuttering issue, which at first we all thought was a simple bad implementation of SATA on common chipsets. Seagate engineers promptly jumped in and worked to try to duplicate the issue and prove where the problem was. This wasn’t a massive rush as 1.5tb drives are what? 5% of the drives on the market. When it became obvious that the issue was more widespread, they buckled down and put out a couple of firmware revisions to fix it.

Now, in the 1.5tb drives, there are 2 main revisions. the the product line that gets the CC* firmware, and the line that gets the SD* firmware. They came out with firmware CC1H and SD1A to fix these issues and started issuing them.

But, seagate has always been restrictive of handing out their firmware, so such updates required calling in with your serial so that the people who had access to hand out the firmware could check a) model, b) part number, and c) current firmware just to make absolutely sure that they were giving the right firmware out. This has been a procedre that has worked for YEARS up until now.

Then the bricking issue came to their attention. It took so long because it’s an issue that’s hard to track down – pretty much the journal or log space in the firmware is written to if certain events occur. IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the drive errors out on init and won’t boot properly – to the point that it won’t even report it’s information to the BIOS.

This is a rare, but still obviously bad issue. Up until now, we all figured it was just some standard type of failure, as it was such a rare event, so we’d RMA the drives.

So, for whatever reason, mid management started freaking out (as it could be a liability for seagate, I suspect – ontop of the already potentially liable issue of the stuttering problem causing drives to fail in RAIDs). So, they pushed the release of the SD1A firmware to the general public. They took a few days to ‘test’, though it was mostly just including some code in the batch file that kicks off the firmware updater, to check that it is a BRINKS drive, and the proper model number. Then it was kicked out to the public.

Please understand, this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update. Suddenly, it’s down to ONE check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just incase the wrong firmware was sent out.

Of course, it starts bricking drives.

Okay, so it’s the old story of somebody in a position of power making a decision to push something out the door to make a problem go away, bypassing a bunch of checks and balances in the process. I suspect that all the people complaining about these drives and the story propagating across the Interwebs was the problem they had to solve.

But there is some potentially good news:

The good news is, the chance of your drive simply not spinning up one day is very low. And for those of you who flashed the wrong firmware – be patient. It’s not bricked, just unable to write data to the platters properly. When they have a *GOOD* firmware out, a new flash should un-brick the drives. If not, flashing it back to SD15 should make it work again.

IF that’s true, then Seagate has a way out. We of course won’t find out until new (hopefully properly validated) firmware ships. Still that’s cold comfort to people who have “bricked” drives.

I still see a class action lawsuit headed right for Seagate.

Obama To Keep His Blackberry…. For Personal Use [UPDATED]

I guess that “Yes We Can” extends to gadgets. Apparently President Barack Obama will get to keep his Blackberry addiction for personal use only. For official US Government use, he’ll have to use a Sectera Edge, is a NSA approved “phone” (it looks huge in the pictures) that runs Windows Mobile.

That’s a let down. But if it allows him to keep his BlackBery addiction, so be it.

UPDATE: Engadget is reporting that President Obama is going to keep his Blackberry addiction and the data on the handheld will be subject to the Presidential Records Act. This came during the daily press briefing. Also of note, there was no mention Sectera Edge.

SEC Reviews Apple’s Handling Of The Steve Jobs Affair

Here’s some news that Apple didn’t need on the day they are planning to release their quarterly statement. According to Bloomberg, Apple is being poked and prodded by the SEC to make sure investors weren’t misled by the company in regards to how they handled the disclosure of whatever ails God Steve Jobs:

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s review doesn’t mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn’t public.

Regardless of how this review comes out, this circus could have all been avoided if Apple were more up front about this whole affair. This should make the earnings conference call at 5PM today very interesting to listen to.

Seagate Updates Bricks 500GB Drives, Then Gets Pulled From Their Website…..WTF?

As if Seagate doesn’t have enough issues, comes this news. It seems that a firmware update that was supposed to fix those dying hard drives I told you about has been pulled by Seagate (check this page and pick a model number and it will say *In Validation* where the update used to be). Not only that, it seems that while the update was available, it seemed to brick (aka: Kill) 500GB hard drives at an alarming rate.

That’s just awesome if you’re a Seagate drive user.

I used to be a fan of Seagate drives. The key words are USED TO BE. Though I have not been affected by this (At least not yet. I have two of the 500GB drives that so far seem to be fine at the moment.), my next hard drives will come from Hitachi most likely as I have had good results with the notebook drive that I installed in my MacBook Pro, plus they have good feedback from various places on the net. Like anything else, YMMV. But at this point, one thing is clear. Seagate seems to have bungled this issue to the point that I can’t trust them with my data anymore. Nor can many other people.

The class action lawsuit I suspect is about to be filed.

Microsoft Stops Expanding…. A Sign Of Things To Come?

It appears that rumors of belt tightening at Microsoft may actually be true after all. According to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Microsoft has halted plans for new construction and not renewed leases on several Seattle properties, all of this is in an effort to cut costs. You’ll also recall that I did post a story about potential job losses at the software giant. Perhaps this is a sign that something is going to happen on that front?

Microsoft Release Vista Virtualizaion Beta…… Now Will You Please Migrate From XP??

This interesting piece of kit just appeared on the Microsoft site today. Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) will let you run Windows XP and Windows 2000 applications on Windows Vista without the need for testing or migration by creating a virtual PC of the legacy version of Windows you want inside Windows Vista. I’m guessing that Microsoft hopes that when this is released in the second quarter of this year, it will help to sell a few copies of Vista and entice people to migrate from XP.

If you feel brave, you can download the MED-V beta from here.

Belkin Busted For Buying Bogus Reviews [UPDATED X2]

I’m sure you’ve all seen customer reviews on various shopping sites on the web such as Best Buy. I’ve always approached them with some amount of suspicion because I’ve always wondered how real they are. Thanks to The Daily Background, I have come to the conclusion that these reviews can’t be trusted.

The story goes something like this. Belkin Business Development Representative Michael Bayard apparently publicly posted to Mechanical Turk that his company would pay 65 cents for every positive review customers left on Amazon.com. Bayard also urged those same users to then mark any negative Amazon reviews as “unhelpful.”

If this were the 1950′s this would be a payola scheme, and would be very much illegal. In this case, it’s not illegal but makes Belkin look really, really bad. Perhaps after this incident it should be illegal to post bogus reviews?

Belkin has since issued an apology, but that doesn’t make the bad taste in my mouth go away. It’s bad enough that I can’t trust the user reviews on shopping websites. But now I will second guess any desire to purchase Belkin product as they are now considered to be suspect in my mind after reading this. After all, a good product shouldn’t need the help of a scheme like this to sell like hotcakes.

Does anyone else feel that way?

UPDATE: There appears to be evidence that this practise is more widespread than previously thought. If I wasn’t going to avoid Belkin products before, I will now.

UPDATE #2: A unnamed Belkin employee is spilling the beans on Belkin’s shady activities.

Eight Million PC’s Affected By Dangerous Worm…. Oh My!

You might recall that back in October I advised you to download an emergency patch from Microsoft so that you can protect yourself from a rather nasty worm that is making the rounds. Well if you haven’t done it by now, you should do so ASAP. CNN is reporting that the Downadup or Conficker worm has infected eight million PCs and counting:

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at anti-virus firm F-Secure, says while the purpose of the worm is unclear, its unique “phone home” design, linking back to its point of origin, means it can receive further orders to wreak havoc.

He said his company had reverse-engineered its program, which they suspected of originating in Ukraine, and is using the call-back mechanism to monitor an exponential infection rate, despite Microsoft’s issuing of a patch to fix the bug.

“On Tuesday there were 2.5 million, on Wednesday 3.5 million and today [Friday], eight million,” he told CNN. “It’s getting worse, not better.”

So to protect yourself, you shou run and not walk to Windows update and make sure you’ve got all the latest patches installed. Or just simply go to this link to download the one patch that stops this issue. Of course running up to date anti-virus software can help as well.