Monday, October 9, 2000		Latest in IT world

The death of dotcoms

During the last one-week, many popular Web sites have announced either closure or lay off plans. The latest addition to the list of causalities in the world of dotcom is the buying site Productopia.com, which provides product information and buying advice, said it plans to shut down operations. Another popular teen site Kibu.com also plans to shut down its operations and has also cut most of its staff team. Similarly, online drugstore more.com has also announced the plans of lay off to about a third of its staff. The list of causalities is however large and growing every month.

The much-awaited launch of the Pentium IV processors from Intel has now been delayed due to a technical glitch in the graphics chip. Recently, the company had announced the launch of Pentium IV chip within a month. Although, as per company, the glitch has been successfully corrected, but the processor has been kept under testing. Earlier, in the previous week, Intel had cancelled another Chip, code-named Timna, which was targeted at the budget market and was delayed earlier. This chip was cancelled due to problems with a companion chip, called Memory Translator Hub (MTH), which was not fixed. The purpose of the MTH was to allow PC makers to combine Timna with regular memory, instead of the more expensive RD-RAM. Moreover, improvements in motherboards and existing chips had also eliminated the cost-cutting advantages Timna was supposed to provide.

Disappointment over the company’s financial performance in the fourth quarter of the fiscal led to a selling wave in this stock. However, history of sorts was being created due to aggressive selling by the investors as the Apple Computers posted the eighth-busiest day in the history for an US stock. On this day, the investors traded 132.4 million shares, which was also characterised by the company’s biggest-ever fall in its stock price in any one trading day. On the fateful day, the stock plummeted $ 27.75, or 52 per cent, to $ 25.75. This steep decline wiped out almost $ 9 billion in market value of the company’s market capitalisation.

The e-mail services of the world’s one the most popular e-mail service provider, suffered a major setback recently, when it observed glitches for roughly two days. This time these services were disrupted in India also. The problem caused bouncing of mails and thus not reaching its destination. Moreover, there were also problems with many users in accessing their accounts.