Good times, bad times
Who hit a home run, and who got out at first base, in the channel last week?
Good Times
Computacenter
"New year, new look" is a mantra which may have been invented by hairdressers and clothes shops to drum up January business, but it seems channel giant Computacenter has been won over by the idea.
From the start of this month to the end of the year, the firm will be based in the City while its Blackfriars Road office gets a facelift.
The reseller and services firm first moved into the space in 1990, and more than 25 years on, the company decided it needed a makeover.
Rumours that Carol Smillie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen will be consulting on colour palettes and soft furnishings were being corroborated as CRN went to press.
LinkedIn power players
That momentary thrill you get when you notice someone has checked your LinkedIn profile is one most mere mortals enjoy only once or twice a week.
Channel veteran Ian Moyse, however, told us his profile is ogled an average 123 times a day after his appearance in a list of "power" players compiled by LinkedIn to celebrate reaching 20 million UK members.
Also featuring in the top 10 UK tech profiles were Sage CEO Stephen Kelly and former Apprentice candidate Lauren Riley.
Despite getting our mums to repeatedly view our profiles, none of the CRN team made it into the rankings.
G-Cloud buyers
You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, so the saying goes. And that is exactly the idea Redcentric had when trying to encourage the public sector to use G-Cloud.
"For every new public sector organisation that I meet on the way to becoming a client via G-Cloud, there are another 20 who can't - or won't - engage to find out what is even possible," said the firm's sales director Mark Halpin.
But rather than stamping his feet and wagging his finger at public sector bodies that won't consider G-Cloud, Halpin has decided to lure them in a different way: a promotion. From January to March, Redcentric is offering a free cloud trial for public organisations.
Nobody likes to be told off -and most can't resist a freebie, so we think Redcentric might be onto something there.
Bad Times
The PC market
As well as being the gestation period of a sea lion, 11 months is how long labourers toiled to build the Empire State Building in 1932/33.
But it's also the time it took the EMEA channel to shift the mountain of unwanted
PCs it was saddled with at the start of last year, according to IDC, which branded 2015 a "costly year" for the market.
It's fair to say the PC market experienced a drop last year to rival the iconic Manhattan skyscraper's 102-storey edifice.
According to IDC, EMEA PC shipments nose-dived 18 per cent to 76.3 million in 2015, with Acer suffering a 31 per cent drop. We feel giddy just thinking about it.
BT
If you are one of the biggest broadband providers in the UK, suffering a major outage that leaves large numbers of customers with internet problems is not high on your wishlist.
But that is exactly what happened to BT, which took to Twitter to apologise for its technical difficulties.
"Sorry if you're experiencing network problems. Engineers are on site now. We will keep you updated," BT tweeted.
But the telecom giant was quick to point out it didn't think it was the result of a malicious attack and The Telegraph reported the technical fault was because of an issue with one of its routers.
We hope BT tried switching it off and on again.
Channel scams
Authorised resellers play an important role in preventing customers falling for tech support scams - unless of course they're the ones doing the scamming.
US Symantec partner Silurian was uncovered by a researcher at Malwarebytes as the apparent source of a scam he dubbed "one of the worst cases of abuse we have seen by far".
The hustle saw users targeted with fake warnings designed to resemble Symantec's flagship Norton Antivirus product in a bid to persuade them to part with up to $249 in cash.
If customers didn't know who to trust before, this kind of sorry tale will hardly bolster their confidence.