Autonomy’s Mike Lynch gets the Oracle treatment
You have to hand it to Oracle, it never misses a chance to humiliate its rivals in public.
On Wednesday it was the turn of Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy. His provocation? To have publicly denied that he tried to “shop” his company to Oracle before eventually selling to Hewlett-Packard. (This has now turned into a “he said, she said” – see updates, below)
iPhone 5, minus the master
How important has Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field been to Apple’s ability to shape perceptions of its new products – and persuade avid buyers to line up round the block to get their hands on them?
With next week’s unveiling of the iPhone 5, which has just been confirmed, we will get the first chance to see what a big Apple product launch feels like without the company’s guiding spirit.
HP’s board puts leadership back on the agenda
Hewlett-Packard’s executive suite looks like it’s in line for another upheaval: as the FT’s Joseph Menn reports, the company is considering showing CEO Léo Apotheker the door after less than a year.
But with all the comings and goings at the top, the company’s boardroom might be a better place to look to if the cycle of dysfunction is to end.
Google cleans house
A quiet Friday afternoon at the end of summer is the perfect time to kill off a batch of under-performing internet services: with any luck, most users won’t even notice.
Late last Friday, Facebook dispatched its daily deals service and Google shut down most of the applications it acquired with Slide. Now Google is at it again, throwing ten more failed experiments onto the junk heap of internet history.
There will be plenty of time for analysis of what now happens at Apple and whether the company can retain is extraordinary leadership of the world of technology, but my first reaction to the resignation of Steve Jobs as its chief executive is sadness.
Mr Jobs, at the age of only 56, stands as one of the great business leaders – arguably the greatest – of the postwar era. For the past 30 years, he has not only led the wave of technological change emanating from Silicon Valley – the personal computer, the internet, the tablet – but stamped his aesthetic on the world.
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