Stories about: Wall Street

Wall Street's 777-point sell-off on Monday signaled that the US tech sector is unlikely to emerge unscathed by the economic downturn -- with companies being hit in unexpected ways. Just look what happened to Apple, which has been performing strongly in recent quarters.

Worries about consumer spending, advertising and the ability of IT companies to raise money appear to have hit many tech stocks harder even than the overall market on Monday, one of the worst days on Wall Street since 1929.

The collapse of Wall Street may prompt financial services firms to increase their use of offshore outsourcing and cut more jobs in the US on top of the layoffs they have already announced.

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.

Critics of Google's proposed advertising deal with Yahoo stepped up the pressure on the US Department of Justice last week, as the agency decides if it will oppose the deal.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

Late last week, the Bush administration unveiled a staggering plan to bail out the financial industry by having the federal government purchase US$700 billion in unwanted mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. For those of you keeping score at home, this means the US government could soon spend nearly US$1 trillion on what amounts to a large pile of trash. To give you some perspective on just how large this sum of money is, we've broken down what sort of assets your company could purchase with US$700 billion, including wireless communications devices, data centers and even new CEOs.

Microsoft Monday said it would ship Windows HPC Server 2008 on November 1 with designs on challenging Linux for supplying high-performance computers and specifically taking aim at ailing Wall Street customers.

VMware has taken a beating in the press and on Wall Street lately over its management upheaval, slower growth rate and competition from Microsoft, but customers at the VMworld conference here said they were either unaware of or unconcerned by the mounting pressure.

Oracle reported first-quarter 2009 earnings of US$0.21 per share, a 28 percent rise year-over-year, the company said Thursday. Overall revenue for the quarter was US$5.3 billion, a rise of 18 percent, while net income was $1.1 billion, up 28 percent over last year.