Gateway To Purchase E-Machines

In an effort to stay alive, Gateway will purchase competitor E-Machines. The resulting company will be the third largest PC manufacturer in the world behind HP and Dell. (or is it Dell and HP?)

I've seen this many times over the years and rarely does it work. When a company like Gateway is struggling they tend to reach for solutions. Purchasing another struggling company seems to be popular. What you usually have left is a larger, struggling company. What will this change? Dell will still have enormous market presence and HP will still be regarded as the most innovative vendor. Can costs be reduced by this type of merger? Sure, but let's face it when your selling your machines for $499.00 how much will it matter? Does E-Machines bring any innovation to the party? Yes, they sell for $399!

I believe there will always be a market for the low end. The question is can a company like Gateway survive there? Walmart is selling HP for $600.00. Dell has $499.00 workstations. Very tough to beat! How much does the spread have to be in order for a purchaser to consider an "off brand" product. And lets face it if your not Dell or HP you are "off brand". Even if you are #3.

Microsoft Still Squeaking By

I just read Microsoft's latest quarterly report. How's this for a down economy? $10.15 Billion in sales, $1.48 Billion profit for the quarter! The profit reflects a $2.2 Billion charge for the Employee Stock Plan. They are making $100 Million dollars every single day! They are sitting on $53 Billion in cash! Every one of their divisions except the Home and Entertainment division has increased sales during the quarter. The Home and Entertainment division sales were down by 5%.

I wonder where they would be if the economy was in better shape. Also imagine that in some countries up to 80% of the Microsoft software is pirated. I think this Bill Gates guy is on to something!

Spyware - The Current Nightmare

Everyone is very aware of viruses by now. And spam is once again becoming a household word. But there is a new nightmare brewing. Spyware is the latest threat to the security and reliabililty of computers connected to the Internet. Spyware are hidden programs that get installed on your computer without you knowing. These programs then run on your computer and perform various tasks. Most of the time they simply track your Internet activity so that the Pop Ups that appear on your screen can be tailored to your interests. Sounds great doesn't it? Well some spyware is a lot more evil. Software can be installed that actually monitors your keystrokes and can either report them back to the bad guy or store them on your machine so the bad guy can access them through the backdoor he created with another spyware program. This is not good. How often do you order things on line and type your credit card number in? Other variants of spyware just wreak total havoc with your computer, in some cases making a complete reload necessary.

So how do these things get on your computer? Well most of the time YOU put them there. Have you installed "helpful" little free programs on your computer from the Internet? Gator, Kazza, Smiley Faces, etc., etc.? These programs all contain spyware and they will even tell you they do. You do read the license screen that pops up when you download these programs don't you. These programs are the monitoring types that simply monitor your browsing habits, bad but not destructive. If you find "free" software of any type on the Internet you should be suspect.

Our experience in the last 6 months is that spyware is causing more problems for our Clients than viruses. Spam is a nuisance and is everywhere but most of the time it's just a aggravation. (Lately viruses and spyware is being nicely packaged in spam messages.)

Another way spyware can get installed on your system is through your Internet connection. If you do not have a properly configured firewall and/or you do not have the Windows Security Updates up to date on your system you are a easy target.

You can purchase spyware tracking software from various sources. One of the best is from www.bulletproofsoft.com.

I'll go so far to say that if you don't have spyware detecting software installed on your computer you DO have spyware. Want to bet?

Microsoft Extends Windows 98 Support

Microsoft was scheduled to discontinue support of Windows 98 on January 16th. Today they announced that they will extend paid support for Windows 98 until June 30, 2006.

With about 20% of workstations still running Windows 98, Microsoft was getting a lot of grief over their dropping of support of the product. In order to keep their customers happy they have extended paid phone support and will provide security updates during this time.

While this is good news I still suggest that Clients that are running Windows 98 workstations look at the benefits of moving to Windows XP. Microsoft will not add new features to Windows 98. Things like wireless, VPNs, firewalls, etc will not be natively available as they are in Windows XP. The bottom line is that XP is easier to use, more stable and more secure.