Articles by Lisa Gill

Buoyed by stronger-than-expected flash memory sales, number two semiconductor manufacturer AMD has raised its fourth-quarter sales forecast by 15 percent The Sunnyvale, California-based company said it is on track to book sales of US$700 million in the fourth quarter. Such a result would represent an increase of nearly 35 percent over third-quarter...

Buoyed by purchases of cell phones and other wireless devices, worldwide sales of semiconductors rose modestly in October, a trade group said Friday According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, figures compiled by World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) show chip sales grew 1.8 percent to US$12.5 billion between September and October. T...

Compared with a year earlier, e-commerce retail sales in this year's third quarter skyrocketed to their highest dollar value since reporting began in 1999, according to a U.S. Department of Commerce survey released Friday The survey by the Census Bureau of 11,000 stores showed that sales, not adjusted for seasonal, holiday and trading-day differenc...

In his first appearance since the announcement of the landmark Microsoftantitrust settlement, CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience last week at the Brookings Institute that the software giant is taking its new leadership role seriously "As CEO of Microsoft, I can personally assure you that we will commit all the time, all the energy and all the resou...

In its first advertising push since its May 2002 merger with Compaq, and on the heels of president Michael Capellas' departure, computer and peripherals maker Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a new campaign to refocus its identity away from its printing and imaging reputation The ads, which seek to portray HP as a full-service computer company, will ap...

Number two semiconductor manufacturer AMD has announced it will lay off 2,000 people, or 15 percent of its global workforce, in an attempt to break even in the coming year. A thousand employees will be notified immediately in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the remaining 1,000 will be laid off throughout this year and into 2003 AMD said it ...

What is free, easy to learn and manage, and compatible with other file formats and every major platform? (Hint: It also represents one less tie to Microsoft.) The answer is OpenOffice.org, according to the creators, managers and evangelists of this open source office productivity suite OpenOffice.org is a two-year-old project, the result of more t...

3D e-commerce is a pair of jeans seen from every angle. It is the ability to mix and match shoes, dresses, coats or belts; to explore the nooks and crannies of an entire home; and to capture the most realistic, detailed view possible As companies scramble to earn a piece of what Forrester Research has called a US$5.2 billion e-commerce market, the...

Up to 78 million taxpayers will have the opportunity to file their 2002 tax returns online for free, thanks to an agreement signed between the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and a coalition of tax preparers that includes TurboTax maker Intuit and H&R Block IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti signed the agreement with the Free File Alliance, which will...

Aiming to capture a market focused on form and size, the number one computer manufacturer has released its smallest desktop PC to date Dell CEO and president Michael Dell unveiled the mini-PC to an audience in Tokyo, touting its flexibility and efficiency....

After beating analysts' expectations Friday with a surprise profit of $2.71 billion in its first fiscal quarter, software giant Microsoft acknowledged over the weekend that a repeat performance in the coming year is not likely Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Australian news sources that the company still sees the software business as a rocky one.

When Apple and Microsoft signed a pact five years ago formalizingtheir relationship, the two companies laid out a detailed road map forthe future. Included was a US$150 million shot in the arm for thethen-ailing Macintosh manufacturer, plus a slew of development agreements, highlighted by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorerfor Mac OS Although th...

IBM has unveiled a chip that can process data at twice the rate of the 32-bit PC processors currently in use. According to published reports, the new chip may power Apple desktop computers and servers in the future IBM said its PowerPC 970 -- the first in the company's planned line of high-end PowerPC processors -- is a 64-bit chip that will run at...

In a sea of drowning tech companies, Logitech's (Nasdaq: LOGI) is an unlikely story -- one of profit, promise and seemingly unlimited potential. The Fremont, California-based peripherals maker is flush with cash, having homed in on a market where the sky is the limit at a price point that defies recessionary pressures How has the company been so su...

Battling a sagging U.S. consumer electronics market, electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics said Wednesday that it will close its Philips Components division in the United States Some sections of the Sunnyvale, California-based division -- which handles optical storage, mobile display systems, emerging electronic solutions and connectivity -- ...

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is slated to announce the release of its .NET Content Management Server 2002 at the annual Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, California The new content management offering will let developers more rapidly publish content to the Web directly from Microsoft Word, according to the company. In addition, users will reali...

The dollars spent by tech sector heavyweights on research and development number in the billions. For example, in the semiconductor space, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) will have spent US$4 billion on R&D by the end of 2002. The company operates more than 75 labs staffed with 7,000 researchers, and it increased its R&D spending by 412 percent between 1991 and 2001.

When Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) announced its second-quarter 2002 results, its outlook seemed promising: Sales of books, CDs and DVDs were up 20 percent compared with the year-ago period. The company's first-quarter report also was positive, showing a 15 percent increase from the first quarter of 2001 However, not everything the e-tailer touches tur...

In a move that will boost production of computer chips found in common consumer electronics equipment, the European Union regulatory board reportedly has approved a joint venture between Germany's Infineon Technologies (NYSE: IFX), Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Agere Systems Each of those three companies will own one-third of the new firm, to be known a...

There is little question that the number of home users accessing the Internet via broadband will continue to grow. With promotional packages pushing the convenience of an "always-on" connection, consumers likely will be attracted to this technology in droves By the end of 2007, broadband's share of the Internet access market will have more than tri...