LONDON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Computer maker Dell ( DELL - news - people ) is stepping up a push into the healthcare services market following its $3.9 billion buy of Perot Systems ( PER - news - people ) with a new offering aimed at simplifying life for hospital professionals Dells's mobile clinical computing service promises to cut the time medical staff waste logging in repeatedly to access patient records as they move around hospitals, with customised systems designed around the user, not the software programme.

Dell can try all they like. But by their stocks you can see that they are losing it. I think people are getting tired of mail order when you can walk into a best buy and have 10 different makes and models to put your hands on at the same or less cost of having a “custom” machine built.
Hewlett-Packard plans to buy 3Com Corp. of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which also makes routers and switches that control network traffic, for $2.7 billion in cash. 3Com shareholders get a 39 percent premium.
While 3Com has done well very recently the company has been a long-term laggard. It earned $115 million in the year ended last May, but this was after eight straight years of losses that totaled $2.81 billion.
What might have been: 3Com started in 1979, five years before Cisco. Cisco’s annual sales are now $36 billion compared with 3Com’s $1.32 billion.

It may be failed, but it is due to a lack of marketing, not a lack of quality. 3com in it’s day made the best modems and network adapters. This has always been HP’s style, and every good businesses, find a company that makes a good product that isn’t profitable, use your brand loyalty to remarket said product and gain new marketshare. It worked for them with Compaq. Who had decent sales but their main market was the pro-liant server line, their desktops were junk. That is why HP dropped the name after people got used to seeing the HP logo.
Cray Dethrones IBM In Supercomputing
Andy Greenberg, 11.16.09, 12:00 AM EST
The underdog's Jaguar system replaces IBM's Roadrunner as the fastest supercomputer in the world.
After five years of big iron domination, Big Blue's supercomputing streak is finally over.

Road Runner system that first broke the so-called petaflop barrier last summer. With Road Runner and the Blue Gene/L supercomputer before it, IBM had held supercomputing's top spot for five years running.
The Top500 testers clocked Jaguar's number-crunching at 1.75 petaflops, or 1.75 quadrillion floating point operations a second. At that speed, the system would be capable of performing in about nine hours the same work that would take a typical Intel ( INTC - news - people )-powered laptop around 2,000 years. Despite more than 30 years of supercomputing history, Seattle-based Cray has never before held the top spot on the Top500 list.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Hewlett-Packard Co. said Wednesday it is buying the 3Com Corp. networking company for $2.7 billion, the latest move by the world's No. 1 personal computer maker to expand into areas more profitable than PCs.
HP also raised its 2010 guidance and reported preliminary quarterly earnings that topped Wall Street's forecasts. The company didn't provide specific reasons for its better outlook, other than a statement from CEO Mark Hurd that "significant growth in China" and "solid execution" helped HP in the quarter

While no one expected Palm’s sales would rival the sales of iPhones or BlackBerrys — and they have not — developers have not rushed to write applications for the phone as they have for the iPhone and Android phones.
A lack of traction could prove important. If the market will have room only for a few smartphone standards, Palm, as the smallest company, could well find itself struggling as the perpetual also-ran.

More fighting

In a direct challenge to computer giants IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., data storage firm EMC Corp. of Hopkinton has allied with Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s leading computer networking company.


In a joint venture, EMC, its majority-owned subsidiary VMware Inc., and Cisco will sell prefabricated business computer systems. The new products will be built with computer servers from Cisco, data storage hardware and software from EMC, and server management software from VMware. “Wherever you touch any one of the three of us, we will look like one company,’’ said Cisco chief executive John Chambers.
Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. was sued by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and accused of threatening computer manufacturers and making billions of dollars in illegal payments to pressure them to use its chips.
Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, violated federal antitrust laws, the state said today in a complaint in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The company got computer makers to agree to use its chips in exchange for the payments, disguised as “rebates,” and threatened and punished manufacturers that worked with Intel’s rivals, Cuomo said.

Hewlett-Packard has fired back at Cisco in the increasingly contentious race to field an overarching data-center strategy, which will enable enterprises to rein in the complexity of sprawling networks and rampant virtualization.
Earlier this week, Cisco linked up with EMC and VMware in a partnership which tightly integrates storage alongside easy-to-manage virtualized data-center bundles called V-Blocks.
On Wednesday, HP unleashed its response. The computing powerhouse announced a converged infrastructure architecture, which essentially creates a one-stop data-center shop. It packages HP's compute, storage, networking offerings into a highly virtualized bundle which can be centrally managed. The server components are HP's BladeSystems.

What Happened?

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125694234715219473.html

Sales are still slumping, and it was very much evidenced by the stock prices over the last few weeks. The tech sector seemed to just crash. I went from being up $4k three weeks ago to down $4k WTF