Has Red Hat scrapped its plans to take on Microsoft with a Linux desktop machine for the emerging world?

Unfortunately it’s not easy to answer that question. A Reuters report from India suggests the answer is yes. But my own questions to the company over the past 24 hours have brought nothing in the way of enlightenment, and Red Hat has now instead churned out this verbose and obtuse posting on its company “blog” (if companies keep using their blogs for this kind of corporate-speak we’ll even look back on good old press releases with nostalgia.) Read more

Along with positive earnings reports this week by IBM and Intel, the latest figures on PC shipments pubslihed on Wednesday by Gartner and IDC should offer some relief to technology investors who have been trying to assess the likely impact of a US slowdown on sales of IT equipment.

Both groups found that the US slowdown had begun to hit PC shipments in the US. But they also found that slower US growth was more than made up for by a stronger-than-expected preformance overseas. Read more