Good times, bad times
Who has been loving life and who has been down in the dumps in the last fortnight
Good times
Channel beef
Forget Taylor Swift vs Kanye West - there's a new feud in town, and it's a fiery one.
Stone Group's chief executive Simon Harbridge and his predecessor James Bird have been locked in a war of words since the former announced plans to put Stone Bidco - a holding company associated with its 2008 MBO - into administration. Bird claims he and other former Stone execs stand to lose about £8.6m from the move, but Harbridge claims the process is one of a number of options Bird & Co agreed to at the time of the buyout.
"Those are the legal documents that were signed in 2008 and he received a substantial amount of money as a result," Harbridge reasoned. "There's no good complaining about it afterwards."
But that didn't wash with Bird, who fumed: "They expect creditors to roll over and lose £10m and walk away? I think not."
EMC
When it comes to their flash storage demands, U2 had ‘Desire' for only ‘One' vendor - and it certainly found what it was looking for.
Yes, EMC revealed last month that it has provided all-flash arrays for the Irish rock supremos' world tour. The storage giant claimed its wares will help them boost concert visuals and better store HD video recordings.
However, it was unclear whether EMC's VNXe 3200 box will also help U2 rediscover their song-writing talents 24 years after the release of their last decent album.
NSA
With its mass warrantless spying and naff 80s logos, the NSA has got a bad rap of late.
But the good news is that at least former HP CEO - and wannabe US president - Carly Fiorina is a fan. She told Yahoo News last week that, while boss of the tech giant, she had gladly handed over truckloads of her company's servers, on which the intelligence bods stored huge amounts of citizens' communications records.
"I felt it was my duty to help," Fiorina explained, in a text to her husband.
Bad Times
Former HP management
We've all sent emails to colleagues we would rather were not seen by anyone other than the intended recipient.
But former HP management embroiled in the Autonomy saga have been unlucky and, amid the legal battle, internal emails between a number of high-flying HP execs at the time of the acquisition have been made public.
Former chairman Ray Lane emailed then-CEO Léo Apotheker a month before the ink dried on the acquisition and asked him to consider if there was a chance to get out of the deal, because elements of the prospect "haunted" him.
We suppose the one silver lining for Lane is he can most definitely say "I told you so."
Software-defined
Anyone who thought slapping the words "software" and "defined" before their wowbox will automatically make it fly off the shelves was dealt a blow by Gartner last week.
According to the research house, software-defined datacentre (SDDC) technology will not become mainstream for five whole years. Gartner cheese Dave Russell warned that due to its "current immaturity" SDCC is most appropriate for "visionary organisations with advanced expertise".
Still, Gartner's bombshell could spell good news for anyone irked b
y the endless proliferation in products that have been given a software-defined spin by tech marketers. How long will it be before software-defined toilet roll makes its debut in Tesco?
Tablets
For the first time ever, the number of tablets in use is forecast to shrink next year, according to the abacus-caressers at ABI Research.
The technology's global installed base is set to peak in late 2015 at a total of 373 million. But this number is projected to fall, as replacement cycles kick in and many consumers opt for new and emerging factors.
These include two-in-ones and phablets, as well as tabiles, mobicoms, all-in-ones, four-in-fives, notetops, lapshells, padpockets, three-piece-suites, and computamobitabnetsystembooks. Probably.