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WHILE the Valley is home to some of the nimblest new businesses on the planet, it has its fair share of lumbering heavyweights. And in the past few weeks, some of the heaviest have been forced into strategic moves that will be reverberating around here for a while.
On Monday, Oracle stepped in where IBm had feared to tread and bought the ailing corporate computing giant Sun. That's a direct challenge to local behemoths Cisco and HP, which used to make the gear that ran most of Oracle's software. Meanwhile, Cisco's recent purchase of Pure Digital, creators of the popular Flip video recorder, makes the company more consumer-focused and puts it head-to-head with HP. HP is still digesting computer services giant EDS, which it swallowed last year in order to compete better with IBM.
Last week, Google revealed it has officially attained lumbering status. The company announced its first quarterly decline in revenue since it went public and its first ever reduction in employees. As a result, the formerly profligate company is in for some belt-tightening. It also may yet gobble up a little upstart like Twitter, to try to get back its growth mojo.
Then there's Yahoo, which has long been less lumbering than bumbling. No surprises this week when the company announced a 78% decline in profits, along with a third round of job cuts. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will try to get back to basics, she said, by rigorously focusing on what the company does best: content, email, search and advertising. She's also following struggling Valley auction house eBay's lead in selling off as many non-core businesses as she can.
One local giant still has a spring in its step, though. On Wednesday, Apple's latest quarterly results came in well ahead of expectations.
* San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom officially joined the 2010 race for Governor of California this week, but forwent the classic rally on the steps of City Hall. Instead he announced the news on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Only then did he appear in public - at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters.
* When actor Ashton Kutcher reached one million followers on Twitter, CNN called it a "historic social media milestone". It was also a nice piece of PR for it, of course, as Kutcher was "racing" CNN itself to the million mark. Local pundits have been asking what the race says about the power of Twitter. The best answer is very little, since Kutcher and CNN were famous already and relied on old media to hype the "contest".
