But Wait, There's More

• The high-tech industry in the United States is expected to lose approximately 234,000 jobs in 2003, according to an annual study just completed by the American Electronics Association. While this is a big number, it's a lot less than the 540,000 jobs that were lost in 2002. The software sector lost nearly 150,000 jobs last year, for the first time in the seven years that the AeA has been publishing the report, "Cyberstates 2003: A State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry." High-tech manufacturing companies shed 233,000 jobs in 2002, including 76,000 at electronic components suppliers, 47,000 at communications equipment makers, and 41,000 at semiconductor makers. Companies in the communications services and software sector lost 146,200 jobs, and the engineering and tech services sector lost 14,800 jobs. Research and development labs and testing labs in the U.S. saw overall employment actually rise by 7,000 people in 2002. The high tech industry in the five biggest states was hit pretty hard in 2002: California lost 123,000 jobs, to 995,000; Texas lost 61,000, to 479,000; New York lost 28,000, to 330,000; Florida lost fewer works in 2002, falling to 271,000 but moving up in ranking by total employee count; and Massachusetts fell by 40,000, to 256,000. High tech exports fell by 12 percent in 2002, to $166 billion, representing 24 percent of all U.S. exports. Venture capital investments in high tech dropped by half in 2002, to $13 billion. Here's to hoping for stability in 2004, although the odds don't favor it.
  
  

• The SCO Group has been busy issuing stock to pay its lawyers for the $3 billion lawsuit against IBM. SCO contends that IBM took Unix intellectual property owned by SCO and put it into the open-source Linux 2.4 operating system. SCO needs to raise a war chest, and it's issuing nearly $8 million in stock and is making a $1 million cash payment to Boies, Schiller and Flexner, the hot-shot law firm that is representing SCO in the IBM suit and is also defending SCO in a lawsuit brought against it a few months ago by commercial Linux distributor Red Hat. And SCO is now saying that Novell's $210 million acquisition of SuSE violates a non-compete agreement that went into effect when Novell sold its Unix business to SCO, in 1995. SCO last year was eaten by Caldera Systems, which was spun out from Novell a few years earlier to start a Linux business. Yes, this is all a bit twisted. Finally, SCO is now saying that the war chest for David Boies and his partners is being built up so it can take on a big Linux user that has refused to pay licensing fees to SCO. Who is it? We're guessing it's one of the big search engines.
  
  
• If you are a small or midsized business, IBM wants your junk hardware, and it wants to pay you to get rid of it. IBM announced that it is expanding its Asset Recover Solutions offering to SMB customers, which pays customers a portion of the fair market value for machinery that still has some value, and charges fees for equipment that is economically useless. Computing equipment has lots of heavy metals and other nasty chemicals in it that are a hazard to the environment, and there are rules from the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States and so-called green laws in Europe that prohibit throwing computers into the garbage. Moreover, some government agencies (like the Department of Defense) have privacy rules that require that information storage devices have proper disposal methods to remove information stored on the machines. The DoD, for instance, requires that hard disks be written over with dummy data three times, to ensure that the original information is not recoverable. The National Safety Council estimates that a stunning 315 million computers were slated to be recycled or disposed of between 1997 and 2004. That's a lot of heavy metal and beige plastic. The disposal operation is being handled by IBM Global Financing, which will try to resell any junk that still is viable. You can find out more at www.ibm.com/financing/dispose.
  
  
• The European Union arguably has been more aggressive about hackers and spam than the U.S. government, and it has just established a special division called the European Network and Information Security Agency to warn its citizens about harmful computer viruses and to help them protect against identity theft and other woes that are common in the Internet era. The EU hopes to have the new agency up and running sometime in early 2004, according to the EU's information security commissioner, Erkki Liikanen. According to EU stats, 90 percent of businesses in the region and 40 percent of households are linked to the Internet. You can find out more about the new agency at www.ffii.org/proj/enisa/index.en.html.
  
  
• IBM plans to add hundreds of new technical and sales people to its channel software support staff in 2004, Computer Reseller News reports. The new jobs will increase the channel, which now employs a few thousand people, by 30 percent beginning in January. Most of the new jobs will be technical, in response to the market's changing needs. The blend of IBM's field force positions will be more technical next year, according to an IBM executive quoted in the article. Adding new technical people has been in the cards since October, when IBM's chief executive, Sam Palmisano, said the company would need to create up to 10,000 news jobs in 2004 to meet the need for high-value services, middleware technologies, Linux, and open-standards-based hardware. So far, however, IBM has cut more than 1,000 jobs in 2003, including 720 in the huge Global Services organization, which apparently didn't have the right mix of "high value" service offerings.
  
  
• Discrete manufacturing and the government will be the most fertile grounds for IT outsourcing through 2008, according to a new IDC report on the uptake of IT outsourcing among 16 different industries. Over the next five years, the highest IT outsourcing growth will occur in the financial market, financial services, discrete manufacturers, and the government, which will lead the pack with a five-year annualized growth rate of 7.4 percent, IDC says. Near the bottom of that continuum will be communications/media companies and education, which, IDC says, will both see a growth rate of about 3.2 percent per year over that same period. The industries most likely to ship out all, or only part, of their IT systems are those with low margins (such as manufacturing) or poor access to IT talent (government), or those that need the latest in IT technology (such as financial services), the analyst firm says. Another trend now taking hold, which should please IBM, is the growth for on-demand services, as opposed to traditional IT outsourcing contracts, IDC says.
  
  
• How would you measure the return-on-investment of a new intranet? Most likely, you would guess or make no measurements at all, according to a new study conducted by Prescient Digital Media , a Toronto, Ontario, company that consults on intranet and extranet projects. The survey found that 51 percent of organizations either make no attempt to measure the ROI of their intranet projects or take a guess, while only 6 percent said they make specific measurements to determine ROI. At the same time, more than three-quarters of the respondents said that ROI was very important to their organizations, and about two-thirds of them reported productivity enhancements as a result of the intranet projects. The survey drew from more than 240 respondents, representing a wide variety of organizations, including KPMG, Volvo, the Royal Bank, and Hewlett-Packard.
  
  

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