Good week/Bad week

Who is on a high and who is bumping along the bottom this week?

GOOD WEEK

Misogyny

Dell must be cursing the day it decided to hire Danish personality Mads Christensen to compere its recent partner and customer summit in Copenhagen.

Christensen's deeply misogynistic comments - which included asking the men in the room to promise to go home and tell their wives or girlfriends to "shut up, bitch" - forced the Texan vendor to issue a grovelling apology and reel off a list of all the groovy things it has ever done for women. "Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events," the vendor added. We hear Roy Chubby Brown is the hot favourite to host Dell's next UK event.

The anti-piracy brigade

The software industry's fierce rhetoric and strong-armed punishments finally bore fruit this week as the UK piracy rate for 2011 was smashed down to 26 per cent. Woo, and indeed, hoo.

The rate last dipped to this historic low in the heady pre-recession days of 2007. Other than that golden year, it has been 27 per cent for as long as anyone can remember.

And, having made early inroads, the BSA has called on governments across Europe to provide more legislative help in stopping the scourge of piracy.

"The EU's current damages rules provide an incentive to infringe," moaned BSA government bod Thomas Boué.

Hear, hear! If these government types sort out the piracy debacle, we're sure the problems of spiralling debt, rising unemployment and a flaccid economy will pretty much take care of themselves.

Samsung

The Korean vendor is definitely on a roll as yet another analyst confirms it is dominating the global mobile and smartphone market.

According to number crun-cher Gartner, Samsung has ousted incumbent Nokia from the mobile handset top spot for Q1 2012 - the first time Nokia has slipped to second place since 1998. That's got to hurt. It also wrestled number one billing from Apple in the smartphone space, with its phones accounting for 40 per cent of the Android-based smartphone market.

But overall the market slowed two per cent in the first quarter. This could either be because everyone already has a phone, or they're waiting for the next version of the iPhone, which could cut short Samsung's smartphone glory.

BAD WEEK

Steve Ballmer

Poor Steve. All his monkeyboy antics on stage and his catchy "developers" spiel seem to have made no difference to his plight after he was voted the top "worst CEO still in a job" by Forbes. In a pretty blunt article, the US business title proceeded to lambast Ballmer for taking Microsoft down the wrong path and not being forward-looking enough.

Whether this prompts the man to take heed and enjoy his many billions in peace remains to be seen. Maybe he could go out for a beer with Cisco chief John Chambers who was listed in fifth place. At least they won't have to worry about the size of the tab.

Shoddy cloud providers

Kelway stuck the boot into "unscrupulous" rivals last week as it unveiled its first packaged cloud services under the ServiceWorks banner. According to the VAR, incumbent cloud providers are commonly selling customers down the river by providing reports that only sum up averages of availability.

"The typical preserves of cloud reporting, such as CPU usage and disk space, are no longer accurate enough to demonstrate how well a service runs," opined Kelway CTO Andy Eccles. "We will have clear, transparent reporting where you can see a high-level view and then drill down into the underlying metrics." Sounds like a plan.

XMA

The Nottingham reseller was arguably a victim of its own success this week as its 2011 figures showed a 17 per cent revenue decline.

The sales slump was largely attributed to the curtailment of some big public sector projects, most notably the Home Access scheme, which gave XMA a hefty chunk of revenue in 2010. But it wasn't all bad news for the VAR, as profits declined at a considerably lower rate than sales and operating margins grew from 2.36 to 2.64 per cent last year.

"Through further investment, we strive to expand our business in related markets," said a cautiously upbeat directors' report.