Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No. 454
26-02-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
Another week, another bout of job cuts | Ryanair experiences turbulence | Leaky Yahoo poised for reshuffle | Microsoft under pressure at home and away | Google loses face
Another week, another bout of job cuts
Job cuts continued apace this week both at home and overseas. In Ireland, Molex, a fibre-optics company based in the Shannon Free Zone, said it would have to enforce compulsory redundancies as fewer than the 100 workers it hoped to lay off applied for a voluntary package. Considering the gloomy jobs outlook in that part of the country, it's little wonder workers were reluctant to voluntarily leave their jobs. In any case, the company will now initiate compulsory redundancies, while the remaining staff will be taking a 5 percent cut in their pay cheque. Elsewhere, Cork-based electronics firm SCI-Sanmina is to cut 150 contract positions as it strives to slash costs. Reports suggest the firm may also make cuts among its 400 full-time staff, who are based in Fermoy, Co Cork. Further afield, Vodafone has announced it will slash 500 UK jobs as part of a plan by new chief Vittorio Colao to cut costs by STG1 billion. Vodafone has said the job cuts would come from all levels of the business, with about 170 at its headquarters in Newbury, England. Finnish mobile maker Nokia also brandished the cost-cutting scissors this week. Up to 1,000 workers will be offered voluntary buy-out packages, while Nokia will implement wider use of short-term unpaid leaves and sabbaticals across the board. Cisco Systems also cut several hundred jobs this week, though the exact figure is as yet unknown, while bankrupt telecoms equipment maker Nortel announced plans to cut 3,200 more jobs worldwide, in addition to the 1,800 it cut last year.
Ryanair experiences turbulence
Budget airline Ryanair had a busy week, announcing the availability of an in-flight mobile phone service, re-launching its website and facing off against what it called "lunatic bloggers". The airline has teamed up with in-flight communication firm OnAir to roll out the mobile service on 20 of its planes. So far the service has been taken up by over 50 mobile operators in Europe, including O2, according to Ryanair, although for now Vodafone Ireland has yet to sign up. While prices will vary from operator to operator, a general guideline is that voice calls will cost between EUR2 and EUR3 per minute, so you'd really want to be sure you absolutely have to make that call. Text messages will come in at around EUR0.50 per text and e-mail will cost between EUR1 and EUR2. Vodafone Ireland has said it's going to stand back and see what kind of demand there is for the service before it signs up, which looks like a good idea; with those prices the main users of the service are probably going to be wealthy enough to not have to get a Ryanair flight in the first place. Also this week, Ryanair launched a revamped version of its website. The new site, which truth be told doesn't look a whole lot different to the old site, has been designed to allow Ryanair feature more advertising as the budget airline tries to grow its ad revenue. Its site is getting around 5 billion page impressions per year and it's eager to generate income from the traffic. In order to do that it's partnered with AD2ONE, a global digital advertising agency. Rounding off its busy week, Ryanair launched a verbal attack on "idiotic" bloggers after web developer Jason Roe blogged about a glitch he'd found on the airline's site when trying to avoid credit card charges while booking a flight. He shared the bug with readers of his blog and Twitter users. A series of comments criticising Roe and the blogosphere in general were subsequently posted, which Roe traced via their IP addresses to Ryanair's headquarters. Ryanair subsequently admitted that it was a staff member who posted the comments on Roe's site. "It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm it won't be happening again," Ryanair spokesman Stephen McNamara said, in a statement.
Leaky Yahoo poised for reshuffle
This past week, Yahoo has been leaking executives, with not one but two of its top execs hightailing it, ahead of a widely speculated management reshuffle. Rumours circulated during the week that Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, is getting ready to re-jig the management structure at Yahoo, with Wall Street Journal affiliated blog AllThingsD suggesting the reshuffle would take place on Wednesday. While this hasn't happened yet, it appears it's definitely on the cards. News broke on Monday that Neeraj Khemlani, head of Yahoo's news and information division, had left Yahoo to join media company Hearst Corporation as vice-president and special assistant to the chief executive for digital media. Then on Wednesday AllThingsD broke the news that executive vice president for the Connected Device Division at Yahoo, Marc Boerries, was to leave the company, citing personal issues. Following the news of Boerries' imminent departure questions are being asked as to what Yahoo will now do with its mobile division, with some commentators suggesting Yahoo will scale back its mobile efforts, while others hoping that the search firm will push ahead with plans in the area. As for Bartz' management shakeup plans, for now it looks like we'll have to hold tight and see what she has in store.
Microsoft under pressure at home and away
It was a trying week for Microsoft; the software giant faced attacks on two fronts, with its Vista operating system coming under the magnifying glass in the US and its web browser marketing facing scrutiny in Europe. In the US, while the Redmond behemoth was no doubt relieved the so-called "Vista capable" case was denied class action status in a Federal Court, it does still face individual suits from consumers who claim its Vista marketing was misleading. Meanwhile, across the pond in Europe, the firm's perennial foe Google successfully applied to become an "interested third party" in the EU's antitrust probe of Microsoft's web browser marketing. In achieving third party status, Google will be able to see just what the charges are against Microsoft, and will then be able to submit its observations to European regulators. The EU is considering the possibility of requiring Microsoft to give users a choice of other browsers inside its dominant Windows operating system. In the far-reaching battle between these two giants, Google is clearly taking every opportunity to put the virtual boot in.
Google loses face
For its part Google didn't have the best of weeks either. The internet colossus took a major hit to its credibility when its web e-mail service Gmail went down on Tuesday for a couple of hours. Google apologised for the outage, saying it was down to a routine maintenance event in one of its European datacentres going awry. In a blog post the search firm explained that "unexpected side effects" of a new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another one of its facilities in Europe to become overloaded. This then caused a knock-on effect from one datacentre to another. "We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future," wrote Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager. Reports indicate that Google is to credit users of its Gmail Premium service with 15 days' free service. As if all that weren't enough, Gmail users were just catching their breath when a phishing attack targeted Google Talk, the chat application within Gmail. Users targeted by the scam were sent a chat message that appeared to look as though it had been sent from a friend's user name. The message contained a link, which asked individuals for their Google log-in and passwords. Google has claimed the two incidents are unrelated and has urged individuals whose accounts were compromised to change their passwords.
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