The term Business Transactions and Business Transaction Management is widely used in the industry but it’s not always well understood what we really mean by it. The BTM Industry Portal provides some good articles on this topic and is definitely recommended to check out. The general goal is to answer business-relevant questions that business owners have for application owners: "How much revenue is generated by a certain products?", "What are my conversion and bounce rates and what impacts them?" or “Do we meet our SLAs to our premium account users?” Challenge 1: Contextual Information Is More than just the URL In order to answer these questions we need information captured from the underlying technical transactions that get executed by your applications when users interact with your services/web site. Knowing the accessed URL, its average response time and then mapping it to a Business Transaction is the simplest form of Business Transaction Management – but doesn’t work in most cases because modern applications don’t pass the whole business transaction context in the URL.
The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VP of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special”. What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. Thats fine, but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money, if this happens IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.
Jelastic, a next-generation platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) offering that runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes, announced on Wednesday the addition of NGINX, the second-most popular open source web server in the world – giving customers greater performance and efficiency for their applications. Using NGINX requires no extra deployment steps or pre-configuration. NGINX offers built-in Layer 7 load balancing and content caching to provide a cost-effective and highly available platform for hosted applications. NGINX delivers 10 times greater performance on existing hardware — combined with scalability, security and high efficiency in memory and CPU — making it the fastest web server in the world. With a market share of 8.5 percent across all domains, NGINX powers 43 million domains and nearly 25 percent of the top 1,000 busiest websites including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, TechCrunch, Dropbox, LivingSocial, WordPress and Hulu. “Our customers need a Java cloud computing platform that creates the highest level of availability and efficiency for their applications,” said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Jelastic. “Adding NGINX as part of our technology stack provides those capabilities.”
Intel defied the post-PC naysayers Tuesday and posted record Q3 results that beat expectations, while Apple, the post-PC icon, stumbled and got badly bruised when it didn’t sell as many iPhones as everybody thought. Intel also forecast Q4 above what anybody – including itself – was expecting, but conservatively below seasonality. It’s hoping for magic from Windows 8 when it finally appears next year. Intel’s immediate tickle is coming from laptops selling particularly into emerging markets like China, Brazil, India, Turkey and Indonesia and enterprise server sales, especially to the cloud, as PC growth in the US and Europe, especially in Europe, slows or is cannibalized by tablets. However, PC sales in China were up 12%, India 21%, Turkey 14% and Indonesia 23%. Brazil is now the third-largest PC market behind China and the US.
After getting bounced out of Exadata when Oracle bought Sun, HP has teamed up with Microsoft to bring out a co-engineered pre-configured Exadata-like appliance fitted with SQL Server. HP paired up with Microsoft earlier this year on the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which runs Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. This new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server is its transactional counterpart. Microsoft describes it as the first out-of-box data consolidation widget good for rapid virtualized private cloud deployment with no software changes. It should be out next month and is supposed to deploy new database instances in minutes, reduce operating costs by maybe 75%, simplify management, save floor space, energy and infrastructure, and ultimately handle thousands of database instances in a scalable virtualized private cloud environment.
After waiting a brief interval for tears shed over Steve Jobs to dry, Google and Samsung, the biggest seller of Android phones, met in Hong Kong and unveiled Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones powered by the brand new Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Apple-loathed Android operating system. Sales of the “co-developed” dingus are set for next month; pricing was not disclosed. The move came a few days after Apple sold a reported four million of its new iPhone 4S in 72 hours, a personal best.
HP said late Thursday that its chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robison, regarded by many inside the company as a big part of its problems, would be retiring (read he was asked) come November 1. “In an effort to drive strategy, research and development closer to the company’s businesses,” HP said, he will not be replaced. HP inherited him from Compaq and, being good at politics, if little else, he came to control HP Labs and M&A and was on the company’s Executive Council. He’s credited with buying Mercury Interactive, Opsware, EDS and 3Com. He’s also believed to have played a part in HP’s decision to exit PCs, tablets and smartphones and buy Autonomy for over $10 billion.
Dell and EMC have finally split after a profitable 10-year run. Dell’s not going to resell anymore EMC products like its Clariion SAN arrays, Celerra NAS servers, Data Domain deduplication appliances and VNX NAS/SAN combo arrays. Instead it will sell its own widgetry in competition with EMC. The Dell-EMC relationship started coming apart in 2007 when Dell bought EqualLogic. Dell’s attempt to buy 3PAR last year strained it some more and it’s buying Compellent Technologies a few months later for its Clariion-competitive mid-range storage really tore it. There’s been expectations of a divorce ever since.
Jelastic – which provides a platform as a service that enables any Java application to run in the cloud – announces an all-star cast of advisors helping the company. Jelastic allows Java applications to be uploaded in minutes without changes to code or programming language and with no need to write for specific APIs (application programming interfaces). Application developers can choose which stack components they want and need, and their application will run and scale easily on the Jelastic platform. Jelastic supports any JVM-based application including pure Java 6 or 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy. The Jelastic beta supports these SQL databases: MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Non-SQL database support is provided for MongoDB and CouchDB. Supported application servers include Tomcat 6 and 7, GlassFish and Jetty. Jelastic provides load balancing and caching though integrated Nginx, and developer tools integration via Maven and Ant plug-ins.
District Court Judge William Alsup Wednesday postponed Google’s billion-dollar-plus trial for allegedly infringing Oracle’s Java patents and copyrights in Android that was tentatively set to start October 31. No new date has been scheduled. Judge Alsup previously warned that he might have to vacate the date reportedly to hear a murder trial that starts October 24 and could run until January or February but now he’s told Oracle and Google’s lawyers that he might shift their case to another judge. Complaining that he’s never been so overworked in the 37 years of his professional life, he told them, “Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can.”
What happens when mission critical Java applications slow down or keep crashing in production? The vast majority of IT Operations (Ops) today bury their heads in log files. Why? because thats what they’ve been doing since IBM invented the mainframe. Diving into the weeds feels good, everyone feels productive looking at log entries, hoping that one will eventually explain the unexplainable. IT Ops may also look at system and network metrics which tell them how server resource and network bandwidth is being consumed. Again, looking at lots of metrics feels good but what is causing those server and network metrics to change in the first place? Answer: the application. IT Ops monitor the infrastructure that applications run on, but they lack visibility of how applications actually work and utilize the infrastructure. To get this visibility, Ops must monitor the application run-time. A quick way to get started is to use the free tools that come with the application run-time. In the case of Java applications, both JConsole and VisualVM ship with the standard SDK and have proved popular choices for monitoring Java applications. When we built AppDynamics Lite we felt their was a void of free application monitoring solutions for IT Ops, the market had plenty of tools aimed at developers but many were just too verbose and intrusive for IT Ops to use in production. If we take a look at how JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite compare, we’ll see just how different free application monitoring solutions can be.
Maybe while Occupy Wall Street is busy tidying up the world it might want to take on the silliness of “expectations,” those hurdles companies are supposed to leap over because Wall Street guesstimates they should. “Expectations” constantly cost billions of dollars. They cost Apple billions Tuesday when it missed “expectations” and didn’t sell the requisite number of iPhones Wall Street thought it should although Wall Street knew as well as all the iPhone buyers out there that Apple was supposed to put out a new iPhone. The miss, as they say, cost Apple $28 a share adding to doubts about the shift in Apple management since Steve Jobs died two weeks ago even though Apple’s earnings and revenues were up “sharply,” as they also say. Apple earned $7.05 a share in its fiscal fourth quarter, up 54% from $4.64 per share a year a year ago when the company reported net income of $6.62 billion as opposed to $4.31 billion. Revenue jumped 39% to $28.3 billion. It was supposed to earn $7.26 a share on revenue on $29.69 billion, making it the company’s first “miss” since 2004. Apple only sold 17.07 million iPhones during the quarter, up 21% year-over-year, but down 16% sequentially and Wall Street figures it should have sold 18 million-20 million since it sold 20.3 million in its third quarter. Apple said it exceeded internal projections but sales were impacted by rumors of the coming of the new iPhone 4S leading to delayed purchases. The new iPhone did of course wrack up sales of four million in its first three days this passed weekend but that’s a fiscal Q1 record. The facts suggest a displacement Wall Street should have anticipated into its models. Meanwhile, Q4 iPad sales more than doubled to 11.12 million, roughly in line with most “expectations,” Mac sales jumped 26% to 4.89 million – while the overall PC business grew under 4% – and iPod sales fell 27% to 6.62 million. Apple’s gross margin of 40.3% was better than the 39.74% expected. Apple is now getting 63% of its revenue from overseas. Its new masters expect earnings of $9.30 a share for its first quarter against analyst expectations of $9.01 a share on $37 billion in revenue. Everybody says that’s anywhere near as conservative as Apple is known to be and a staid new CEO Tim Cook even predicted that Apple, with its “unbelievable” pipeline, will set “an all-time record” for iPhone sales this quarter. He could not predict when supply might meet demand. Apple has also cut prices on older models to attract the price-conscious. The company now has an amazing $81.6 billion in the bank. It may be time to reinterpret what exactly a growth stock is.
HTC’s attempt to block shipments of Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch into the United States failed Monday when the US International Trade Commission found that Apple didn’t infringe four HTC patents. The preliminary decision will either be confirmed or denied by the full six-member commission in February. HTC, the second-largest maker of Android devices, has another claim against Apple with the ITC still pending. Apple has already won an ITC round against HTC in a decision expected to be reviewed by early December.
Samsung opened a new front in its global patent war with Apple Monday when it asked courts in both Japan and Australia to block sales of Apple’s new iPhone 4S. It’s also trying to get iPad 2 and the iPhone 4 outlawed in Japan. In Australia Samsung has charged Apple with violating three wireless Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and HSPA patents that are 3G-standards essential, a factor deemed to reduce its chances of succeeding. A Dutch court Friday threw out a Samsung bid to enjoin the iPhone and iPad based on those kinds of patents. Apple also claims patent rights to Samsung widgetry via Qualcomm whose chips it uses.
HP is poised to backtrack on the notion of spinning off its $40 billion PC business according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper heard that “recent analyses by Hewlett-Packard and its top advisers indicate that the costs of spinning off HP’s personal-computer business might outweigh the benefits,” if for no other reason than “separating the PC division would significantly diminish HP’s buying power with component makers, complicate its supply chain and reduce product margins on some products.” We heard – well, everybody’s got leaky HP sources – that HP was “surprised at the synergies,” like nobody’s been watching the store.
Gartner says global PC shipments rose 3.2% in the third quarter to 91.8 million units, which is a lot given the deplorable world economy but the number doesn’t meet the researcher’s projection of 5.1%, suggesting that Gartner was overly exuberant. It probably won’t come as news to anybody that EMEA, particularly Western Europe at 26.6 million units, was a weak sister. Its shaken consumer confidence infected even netbooks. Lenovo got the upset it was angling for and displaced Dell as the world’s second-biggest PC vendor. Gartner figures it has 13.5% market share, up from 11.1% year-over-year passing Dell’s 11.6%, down from 12.2% on a shipment decline of 1.4%. Globally that puts Lenovo right behind HP and its 17.7%, up from 17.3%. Lenovo now means to put the squeeze on HP, which still holds the premier place. It seems to be threatening a price war, claiming more efficient production.
Citrix Thursday morning said it bought a cloud-based data storage, sharing and collaboration shop called ShareFile that will add data to its “Follow-Me” desktop and apps platform. Terms were not disclosed. Apparently the five-year-old North Carolina concern never brought in any venture capital. Citrix called the acquisition “highly strategic.” ShareFile’s widgetry, directed at business, lets users share files across multiple devices and access them from anywhere. Citrix is betting the so-called personal cloud, where people aggregate their unique apps, data, preferences and friends, will be worth billions by 2015.
US Federal Judge Lucy Koh said that Samsung’s Android Galaxy tablets and smartphones infringe Apple patents and can be barred from sale in the states if Apple’s patents prove valid. Apple claims that Samsung “slavishly” copied its widgetry and Samsung’s own lawyer couldn’t tell the difference between them in court from a few feet away when the judge held them up. Still, the judge did deny Apple an immediate injunction on one of its so-called “utility” or “scrolling” patents – at least tentatively – and made no decision on the “design” patents that obviously upset her. She said she would soon ahead of any a full-blown trial. Apparently she could go either way. Samsung has also lost its 3G patent claims in Holland Friday. It was trying to get an injunction against Apple tablets and smartphones based on standards-essential FRAND-unencumbered patents. It was basically laughed out of the court, which decided the royalties Samsung was asking was way too much to meet fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. The court said if Samsung makes Apple a fair and reasonable offer and the companies still can’t reach an agreement then Samsung can file a new injunction motion. FOSS Patents figures Samsung will eventually have to try to settle with Apple on Apple’s terms, which will probably mean a redesign, removing functionality and paying royalties on patents Apple is willing to license. The blog says Motorola Mobility’s patents are also FRAND-pledged so Google can’t get much protection there. By the way, MMI just cut the price on a 16GB version of its Xoom tablet to $379, down from $499 for its usual version and undercutting the entry-level iPad by $100. MMI reportedly shipped 690,000 Xoom tablets in the first half. There’s a hearing in France in a few days on a Samsung motion for a preliminary injunction against the iPhone 4S also based on 3G standards patents. Apple did suffer one clear reversal. The Australian court that just gave Apple the temporary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet that it wanted denied it an injunction against any Samsung tablet and said it couldn’t have an early glimpse of such a device before its release.
Apple has gotten the temporary injunction it was seeking to block Samsung from selling its Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, according to reports out of the Sydney courtroom where its infringement motion was heard. Samsung’s lawyers previously complained that the thing would be a dead letter if it didn’t hit the market this month in time to capture the holiday rush. Samsung agreed a couple of months ago not to market the device ahead of a court ruling. A German court has also forbidden the tablet to be sold in Germany, the main European market. Both actions are supposed to proceed to full-blown trials probably next year although the Australian court is offering an early hearing. Samsung has resisted the idea of a quick trial. Defending its dominance Apple has accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying its technology in multiple jurisdictions. A hearing in the US is imminent. The Australian federal court upheld Apple’s objections to Samsung’s touchscreen and the gestures that control it that Apple claims are covered by two of its patents.
Within JDev 11g+ experienced ADF programmers will be familiar with PageFlowScope beans used by tasks flows, in particular Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) where they provide the equivalent of session scope for variables for the life of the BTF for a specific user session. Indeed the Oracle documentation says the following about PageFlowScope beans: Choose this scope if you want the managed bean to be accessible across the activities within a task flow. A managed bean that has a pageFlow scope shares state with pages from the task flow that access it. A managed bean that has a pageFlow scope exists for the life span of the task flow. Given we know BTFs have a distinct beginning and end for each user session, a "life span" as such, and conversely Unbounded Task Flows (UTFs) live for the life of the application which is nearly forever, it would appear that PageFlowScope beans only apply to BTFs. However PageFlowScope beans provide some magic sauce with UTFs that shouldn't be ignored. Before we can have a look at this magic sauce we need to cover some background on modern browsers.
Steve Jobs died at home in Palo Alto, California at about three o’clock last Wednesday afternoon according to the death certificate issued Monday by the Santa Clara County Public Health Department in San Jose. About 90 minutes later Apple released the news. The immediate cause of death was respiratory arrest but the underlying cause was a neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas that had metastasized. No autopsy or biopsy was done. He was buried Friday at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. The document suggests that the cancer had spread to other organs five years ago, two years after the tumor was removed and three years before he got a new liver. He might have fared better if he hadn’t spent nine months trying to cure the pernicious condition with diet before submitting to an operation.
With the huge amount of sessions at Oracle Open World, it’s often hard to find the little gems of information amongst all the marketing. This is true of ADF like all other technologies at the conference, there’s simply a lot of information to digest and filter. Luckily Oracle publishes the presentations PPTs afterwards and it’s possible to find a jewel or two in all the content with some careful searching.
For the ADF developers among us, this blog post attempts to summarize some of the main ADF takeaways from Oracle Open World 2011. Please remember this is my summary, not Oracle’s (I am not an Oracle employee), and Oracle publishes all of this content under the Safe Harbor statement which means they cannot be held to anything they published.
All the links in this post are not guaranteed to be up forever as Oracle may remove them in the near future. I suggest if you're interested in reading the presentations download them now.
Finally I apologize for some of the clunky grammer and phrases in this post, I wrote it on the plane back to Australia with the usual jetlag that fogs the brain.
ADF Mobile
Of the large announcements at Oracle Open World 2011, the soon-to-be-released (2012) Mobile edition of ADF was the most significant in the ADF space. Some key points of the new platform is it supports both iOS and Android, runs on device with a mini JVM, and uses PhoneGap to allow the native app to access the device’s native facilities.
For me the most telling part was the architecture diagram from the Develop Mobile Apps for iOS, Android, and More: Converging Web and Native Applications presentation by Oracle Corporation’s Joe Huang, Denis Tyrell, and Srini India:
Data Visualization Controls
Dana Singleterry and Jairam Ramanathan from Oracle included screenshots of upcoming DVT components in their Building Visually Appealing Web 2.0 Data DashBoards. First we see a new Network Diagrammer:
As can be seen the component demonstrates the relationship between disparate nodes. This is incredibly useful for visualizing relationships in data. Another screenshot showing a different data relationship structure:
In terms of graphs Oracle is looking at a Treemap graph:
…and a Sunburst graph:
...both useful for showing hierarchical data visually. Of all the DVT controls the Timeline graph excites me most, something I’ve asked for in the past:
However I must clearly stress to readers these DVT controls are not in the current 11.1.2.1.0 release, and under Oracle’s safe harbor statement is not guarantying they will ever see be released (but fingers crossed anyway huh?).
Maven integration
As the ADF EMG moderator I’m involved in a lot of discussions in the community about the IDE and the framework. One hot topic is JDeveloper’s Maven support. 11.1.2.0.0 introduced the first cut of Maven support for the IDE, as discussed by Oracle’s Susan Duncan’s Team Productivity with Maven, Hudson and Team Productivity Center. This first slide shows the current Maven support:
Of more interest is the planned Maven features for 12c, which not only tells me Oracle is committed to Maven support, but also there are definitely limitations in the current implementation:
Most importantly here for me is the first 2 bullet points, which means I wont recommend to customers working with Maven until Oracle makes these available. Don’t get me wrong though, a couple years back there was no Maven support and it’s great Oracle is working to fill that gap completely.
What can Fusion Applications teach us about ADF?
Unlike OOW10, this year at Oracle Open World there was considerable more Fusion Applications demonstrations and presentations. This has been a boon as previously we’ve seen a lot of demos of dashboard-like-screens that while pretty don’t show us where the real work occurs for users. Fatema Madraswala from PwC and Rob Watson from Oracle included screenshots of the Fusion Applications Talent Management system (The very first Fusion go-live case study:
It’s curious to me that while Oracle has put a lot of effort into communicating the User Experience design effort put into Fusion Applications, then we see a screen that looks Oracle-Forms like, especially with it’s tabbed interface. In turn the worksheet at the bottom looks cluttered with buttons and fields. Yet with respect designing user interfaces for complex business systems is surely not easy.
I recommend ADF developers to search out as many Fusion Applications screenshots as possible as it reveals an insight into how to build the UI and what is and isn’t possible.
What about E-Business Suite?
EBS customers might feel the whole ADF/SOA bandwagon is passing them bye, what with the focus on Fusion Applications. Yet this year saw presentations tailor fitted to cover integrations points with EBS. I must admit I can’t really comment on the quality of the solutions as I have no direct experience with EBS, so I’ll leave experienced readers to make their own assessment. Check out the presentation entitled Extending Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite from Oracle’s Veshaal Singh, Mark Nelson and Tanya Williams.
MetaData Services
As extension to the Fusion Applications demos, I’m detecting more down-and-dirty technical presentations on MedaData Services (MDS) where the framework can support personalizations and customizations. Gangadhar Konduri and a fellow Oracle colleague discussed the theory and demonstrated customizing a Fusion Applications module, with a focus to what technical people need to know. I must admit in the past I’ve been a little skeptical of MDS et all, not for it’s implementation but just the lack of information around on how to maintain and work with it from a developer/administrator point of view. However I’ll need to step back and reassess that opinion. You can read more in Gangadhar’s Managing Customizations and Personalization in Oracle ADF MetaData Services.
For ADF Experts
For the ADF experts who feel many of the presentations aren’t aimed at them, it’s well worth catching one of Steven Davelaar’s presentation. Steven who is the JHeadstart Product Manager at Oracle extends and pushes the ADF framework to its limits. His presentations often include large amounts of code where I discover new properties and techniques way beyond my current level of expertise. This year Steven presented Building Highly Reusable ADF Task Flows and Empowering Multitasking with an Oracle ADF UI Powerhouse for the ADF EMG (great title Steven ;-).
ADF Tuning
From my own perspective one of the most important presentations I attended was Oracle’s Duncan Mill’s ADF – Real World Performance Tuning presentation. As I now have several clients with production level ADF applications, my focus has moved away from the basics of creating ADF applications to architecture and performance. Duncan’s presentation aggregated a wide range of tuning hints into an easily digestible guide, highly valuable.
FMW Roadmaps
In a separate presentation entitled Certified Configurations of Oracle ExaLogic, Oracle Fusion Middleware, BI and Oracle Fusion Apps by Pavana Jain and Deborah Thompson from Oracle Corp, the future roadmap for FMW releases was revealed. Readers are reminded the safe harbor statement means Oracle doesn’t have to stick to what they present, so take the slides as guidelines only.
The first slide shows the approximate dates of each version:
The second slide reveals which 11g FMW products will be included in each release:
Some readers might find it curious why the 11g 11.1.1.X.0 series continues to at least 11.1.1.7.0 while there is already an 11.1.2.0.0 release of JDev. My understanding this is occurring because Fusion Apps will continue on the 11.1.1.X.0 series for some time yet thus extending the life of that branch.
Finally the third slide the same for the 12c FMW products:
Oh and the ADF EMG had a great event too
The ADF EMG also had a "super" Super User Group Sunday, but people are probably a little sick of me talking about it, so I'll just push you to a link instead.
Pre-orders for Apple’s new iPhone 4S spiraled past the million mark within 24 hours Apple says. That’s better than any iPhone before it. The old Apple record was held by the iPhone 4, which was pre-ordered 600,000 times its first day. Apple SVP of worldwide product marketing said, “The first-day preorders for iPhone 4S have been the most for any new product that Apple has ever launched and we are thrilled that customers love iPhone 4S as much as we do.” The widget hits Apple retail stores in the US on October 14 and are due to move out to 22 other countries by the end of the month. The pre-order floodgates opened before dawn last Friday, the day of Steve Jobs’ private funeral.
Google and Samsung have pulled the unveiling this week of the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and Samsung’s new Ice Cream Sandwich-based Nexus Prime phone lest they seem insensitive to Steve Jobs’ widely mourned death last Wednesday from a rare form of pancreatic cancer. On its blog Samsung said, “Samsung and Google have decided to postpone the Samsung Mobile Unpacked event during the CTIA in San Diego, previously scheduled for Oct. 11. Under the current circumstances, both parties have agreed that this is not the appropriate time for the announcement of a new product. We ask for your understanding regarding any inconvenience caused. We will announce a new date and venue in due course.” A Samsung spokesman later told CNN, “We just felt that it wasn’t the right time to make a major product announcement while the world is still paying tribute to Steve Jobs. There’s never been such an iconic figure in our industry pass away before.” Google pretty much said the same thing. Reports suggest the event has been postponed till October 27 in London. However, the worldwide litigation between Samsung and Apple is not expected to be affected. They’ll be in court this week. Ice Cream Sandwich, which will probably be styled Android 4.0, is supposed to merge elements of Honeycomb and Gingerbread, Google’s smartphone and tablet widgetry, into one OS.
HP is going to decide whether it will spin off its giant PC unit by the end of the month according to what CEO Meg Whitman told a women’s leadership conference on Tuesday. “It’s a decision I want to make much faster than my predecessor,” Bloomberg reported her saying. “I want to make it before the end of October.” Her predecessor Léo Apotheker had given HP till the end of the calendar year, an untenable pain point for the company. Whitman is also hoping to meet the analysts’ reduced expectations at the end of the month, which is the end of its fiscal year. Consensus calls for $1.13 on $32.1 billion.