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Two top research firms are cutting forecasts for 2009 personal computer sales, with them expecting 2009 to be the industry’s toughest in at least seven years amid falling sales of high-end computers. IDC, for instance, has reduced its outlook for 2009 worldwide PC unit growth to just 3.8 percent compared to this year.

That's quite a drastic cut from the 13.7 percent growth initially projected, with the latest report particularly mentioning how the hardest hit areas will be the emerging PC markets of Latin America, Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa due to falling commodity prices and the worldwide credit crunch. Likewise, just a few weeks ago iSuppli slashed its 2009 growth forecast for worldwide PC shipments by nearly two-thirds because of the deteriorating economy. The analyst firm is now projecting that shipments will rise by 4.3 percent in 2009, down from its previous forecast of 11.9 percent.

Despite the dreary picture the market researchers are painting, sales in general are still being driven by demand for laptops and the need to replace older systems, but there is a discrepancy between the growth in units sold and value of those PCs because prices are falling as consumers and businesses are willing to spend less for new PCs.

The never-ending talks centering around Microsoft and Yahoo have continued, with both web giants recently dismissing new rumors that the companies are discussing some sort of partnership or have Yahoo's Search business sold to Redmond. Recent news articles from the Wall Street Journal and NY Times indicated that Microsoft was already “agreeing” to a deal, but neither company has made any announcements pertaining to this. Considering how open both companies have been the past year with their intentions, a behind-closed-doors deal would seem unlikely at this point, especially with Yahoo under fire for their sudden drop in value after initial talks with both Microsoft and Google went south.

Much of the current rumors are spun from recent statements by Steve Ballmer, who mentioned not long ago that he would still be “interested” in a deal with Yahoo – not that such a deal was actually formulating. The suffering stock of Yahoo has led to a lot of internal turmoil, but apparently it's still not yet enough for the company to bail. Let's not forget Yahoo is still a profitable business.

Even if Yahoo did choose to find some form of exit out of the search business, they still have numerous other services at their disposal. Yahoo may be suffering, but they certainly aren't out of options.

The WiMAX joint venture between Sprint and Clearwire is finally a done deal, despite a few setbacks along the way, as is the $3.2 billion cash infusion from Comcast, Intel, Google and others. The transaction, announced back in July, brings together both companies’ WiMAX assets under a new company valued at $14.5 billion that will retain the Clearwire name.

The WiMAX network will be branded Clear and should initially deliver average download speeds of 2 to 4 megabits per second. Sprint's WiMAX service in Baltimore, which currently runs under the XOHM brand name, will transition to the Clear name in the coming months as Clearwire converts most of its existing pre-WiMAX networks in 46 markets to standard mobile WiMAX. The new service will be an open standards-based network that will enable customers to use any WiMAX device.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system last month took its biggest market share dive in years, according to some new Net Applications statistics, with the number of Windows users surfing the web falling below 90 percent. Specifically, Windows secured 89.6% of the global PC market in November, down from 92.4% a year before, 94.2% in November 2006, and 96.4% in October 2004.

This is still quite an enviable position for any company, but it’s believed to be the first time Windows market share has dipped below 90 percent since the mid-1990s, when Windows 3.1 ruled the Microsoft roost. Apple’s Mac OS X, meanwhile, posted its biggest gain in a two-year period, growing by 0.66 percentage point to end the month at 8.9%. Linux also gained ground but Net Applications’ numbers still pin it under the 1% threshold at 0.83%.

Buying a new BMW looks set to become a much more hands-on process, with the German car maker hoping to entice potential customers by using Microsoft’s Surface computer to configure the cars. Dubbed the BMW Product Navigator, the new system lets users customize their future car by placing small tiles onto the screen and then watch a computer-generated video of the vehicle in action.

Potential buyers can customize their new car’s interiors and exteriors in an interactive way and then take the results home via email, printed or saved to a USB drive. There’s nothing ground-breaking and it’s not surprising either to see BMW adopting new technologies, but it’s still incredibly cool. The company has not yet specified when the BMW Product Navigator kiosks will be widely available, though.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has previously stated he had no knowledge of the whole “Vista Capable” fiasco, in which the company apparently lowered the minimum requirements to run Vista in order to help Intel sell their motherboards with embedded 915-based graphics chipsets, but a federal judge wants him to testify in an ongoing class action case anyway.

Apparently, the judge is curious as to what was discussed in a phone call between Ballmer and Intel CEO Paul Otellini on January 30, arguing the Microsoft exec may have “unique personal knowledge of relevant facts.” Ballmer has 30 days to meet with plaintiffs’ lawyers for his deposition and will be forced to testify when the case goes to court next April.

TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 @ TIME
Canadian regulators allow P2P throttling @ ArsTechnica
Will technology drive global recovery? @ InfoWorld
Web debut for Guns N' Roses album @ BBC News
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Five years ago in TechSpot:
'Spyware' would be tricky to outlaw

The amount of content available online has risen exponentially the past few years. Any respectable news agency will have at a bare minimum all their articles online, and the overwhelming majority usually offers something more in the venue of live updates, comment sections and more. Thus it's no surprise that more and more, people are relying on the Internet for news and information as opposed to magazines and newspapers.

Some companies are working hard to embrace that, and PC Magazine is one of them. The magazine, which has been in print for nearly 27 years, before the Internet as we know it even existed, has decided to go fully digital at the beginning of next year. Their January 2009 issue will be the very last printed edition. For the people who still subscribed to the paper magazine, the company is offering digital subscriptions as a replacement.

A statement by PCMag outlines numerous reasons why they're switching to an all-digital format, ranging from the greater interactivity it allows, the reduced impact on the environment, ease of distribution and a lot more.

An East Texas federal jury has ruled that Sony must cough up $18.5 million in damages to a company called Agere Systems for a patent violation on a “wireless local area network apparatus” included in the PSP and other handheld devices such as the mylo Personal Communicator and Network Walkman audio players.

When the suit was originally filed in March of 2006, alleging Sony knowingly and willfully infringed on this and seven other patents, with the slate of complaints being cut down over the intervening years. Also since the filing of the suit, Agere Systems has ceased to exist, having merged with silicon and software tech firm LSI Corporation in 2007.

Sony was also recently hit with a patent claim for the PS3 Blu-ray capability, but won a dismissal in a related suit and settled with Immersion over controller vibration in 2007 for the DualShock 3.

A recent Gartner research shows 85 percent of firms use at least one piece of open source software in their business IT infrastructure, with the remaining 15 percent expected to do so over the next twelve months. But while most of us would assume this is a good thing, the market researcher apparently thinks otherwise.

According to the report, 69 percent of these companies don't have a formal open-source management team and this apparently opens up huge potential liabilities for intellectual-property violations, inadvertent or not.

The Gartner survey results also indicated that open source software in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations; and that the top three reasons for using OSS were total cost of ownership, cheaper development and the fact that it is easier to embark on new IT projects or software initiatives using an open-source base.

Following a tumultuous year and a half at the forefront of one of web’s biggest properties, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is stepping down from his chief executive role as soon as the board of directors appoints a replacement for him. Yang failed to bring either a viable merger partner or a strong revenue-generating deal in his short tenure as Yahoo CEO, so his resignation doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

Earlier this year, Yahoo rejected a $33 per share buyout offer from Microsoft and decided to focus on a search advertising partnership with Google instead. The move was met with disapproval by many share-holders and since then the company’s stock share price has plunged incessantly – reaching $13 earlier this month when Yahoo’s planned deal with Google also fell apart.

Once its successor as CEO is appointed, Yang will remain as a Yahoo board member and resume his previous role as “Chief Yahoo” – whatever that means. His impending step down leaves much unresolved for the Internet company, which has been struggling to remain independent for months, but could perhaps pave the way for a deal of sorts with Microsoft.

We’ve all faced the frustration of buying a shiny new toy only to find ourselves struggling with a lack of herculean strength – or a toolbox – to get through the packaging. Even worse, over 6,000 U.S. citizens per year make hospital visits because of injuries provoked by opening the potentially dangerous hard plastic shell designed to curb theft.

With that in mind, online retailer Amazon started a campaign earlier this month to abolish the consumer unfriendly plastic packaging in favor of the old-fashioned cardboard box. And while it is relatively easy for them to adopt the new scheme considering they don’t have to deal with shoplifting, even those who sell from shops are coming up with solutions to this seemingly trivial but often infuriating problem.

Microsoft, for instance, has unveiled an unusual container for the Explorer computer mouse it sells at Best Buy stores that is easily opened using a zipper on the side. Meanwhile, Sony has adopted a new method that allows packages to be easily opened but emitting a loud Velcro-like noise intended to deter thieves. Could this be the beginning of the end for clamshell packages? I certainly hope so.

More emails have surfaced in an ongoing class action lawsuit against Microsoft, revealing how a Hewlett Packard executive was irate over Microsoft’s decision to loosen the minimum chipset specifications for a PC to carry the ‘Vista Capable’ label in order to help Intel. Microsoft’s Jim Allchin, in charge of Vista’s development and delivery was also left outraged.

As it turns out, up until the end of 2005, WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) was listed as a requirement of Vista, but a last stage decision mandated a downgrade of the program’s requirements to include Intel's outdated 910 and 915 graphics chipsets.

The decision of course pleased Intel as it saved them billions of dollars in potential lost revenue – the non compliant Intel i915 chipset was being deployed in a huge number of laptops back then – and a shift of business to AMD and Nvidia. On the other hand, HP was enraged given the significant investments it had made to upgrade to newer PC graphics technology based upon Microsoft's initially more demanding specs.

Ars Technica has summed up the contents of the emails in a recent article – quite an interesting read. The lawsuit, which began nearly a year and a half ago, was granted class-action status last February and is currently set to go to trial in April.

Merely a week after closing down 155 retail stores in 28 states and announcing plans to cut around 17% of its staff, Circuit City has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and obtained a $1.1 billion credit lifeline to battle a sharp decline in sales. The retailer said it’ll continue operating “without interruption” as management focuses on developing and executing a comprehensive corporate restructuring plan.

The credit replaces Circuit City’s current asset-based credit facility and will provide additional immediate liquidity to pay vendors and other suppliers while the company reorganizes. No additional store closings were announced, but the company did say it will eliminate some 700 more positions in an effort to cut costs. Circuit City's Canadian operations will also be seeking bankruptcy protection under the Creditors Arrangement Act in the country.

In addition to filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Nvidia back in July, technology licensing company Rambus has seen it fit to ask the International Trade Commission for an import ban of graphics cards that use Nvidia chips – which includes products from Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA and others.

The company alleges that Nvidia and its partners are infringing on nine patents covering DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, GDDR, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory controllers. The ITC is expected to decide whether to initiate an investigation under this complaint within 30 days, according to Rambus, which has a long history of lawsuits against companies relying on memory technology – many have gone to their favor and several against, so we’ll have to wait and see where this goes.

Continuing with the Microsoft-Yahoo melodrama, Steve Ballmer has dismissed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s suggestion earlier this week that it would be in their “best interests” to look at acquiring Yahoo. The Microsoft executive put an end to all speculation, while at a business lunch in Sydney, by saying it is not interested in making another offer for the failing Yahoo.

Of course, Yahoo stock surged in price earlier this week when it was rumored that a new deal may be on the cards, so whether Ballmer is truly saying no or simply waiting to see if Yahoo’s stock drops even more remains to be seen. In any case, he didn’t completely shut the door on a search partnership, something Yahoo will have to consider if it wants to stay alive following the demise of its much-needed search partnership with Google. The full video of Ballmer’s speech to developers in Sydney is available here.

AMD has announced plans to cut 500 jobs as part of its ongoing “asset light” effort to reduce expenses and reach a break-even point of $1.5 billion in quarterly revenue. This is their second round of job cuts this year, following an announcement in April to layoff around 1,600 staffers, or about 10% of its workforce at the time.

AMD has been trimming the fat lately, and is currently in the process of splitting into two businesses: one that focuses on microprocessor design and another that will manufacture them. The company now has some 15,000 employees and plans to have the majority of them handling processor designs, while roughly 3,000 will head to newly-formed The Foundry Company early next year.

In the coming weeks AMD will be releasing their new 45nm server and desktop processors, codenamed Shanghai and Deneb respectively, so asset light or not the struggling chipmaker better shape up and bring something interesting to the table if it wants to level the playing field with Intel.

After being rebuffed multiple times, Microsoft made it clear that they are no longer interested in a Yahoo deal. Now that the Google-Yahoo search deal has fallen apart, however, the pressure is back on chief executive Jerry Yang and he is running out of options.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, Yang said he was willing to sell the company at the right price and suggested that Microsoft might be a good candidate, yet the software giant is probably leery of re-engaging negotiations as long as he is running the show. Yahoo is currently trading at around $14.50, a lot less than the $33 per share offered earlier this year. In other words, Microsoft is the big winner here, either it gets to buy Yahoo on the cheap, or it can focus on improving its online business and steal market share from Yahoo while the latter continues to struggle.

Dell has begun asking employees to “voluntarily” take up to five days off without pay as part of an effort to cut costs this quarter. The unusual request was made via a memo from CEO Michael Dell, in which he highlighted a 10 percent workforce cut announced in 2007, and suggested a new round of layoffs could begin if these measures don’t achieve the desired results.

The company also instituted a global hiring freeze, is offering an enhanced severance package for employees who voluntarily leave the company, cutting travel budgets, and reducing the number temporary and contract employees. Dell did not provide a monetary figure for the savings it expects from these moves, though it’s being reported that these latest efforts are intended to result in additional savings beyond the $3 billion in annual expenses the company previously pledged to cut over the next three years.

It seems Logitech has had a busy week. Shortly after announcing its premium wireless guitar controller for the wildly popular Guitar Hero video game, the peripheral maker has revealed plans to enter the software market by acquiring internet video services provider SightSpeed for $30 million in cash.

Logitech already sells high-end video cameras, so the acquisition makes sense for the company as it vies to distinguish itself from competition by tying its hardware to software from SightSpeed. According to Logitech, the deal should help them “move more quickly toward [their] goals for video services” and take video-conferencing “beyond the PC.”

Logitech did not elaborate on the “beyond the PC” part, but we can probably expect stand-alone peripherals with SightSpeed technology built-in hitting the market after the acquisition is over.