August
Traditionally one of the most conservative tech companies, HP saw its CEO - Mark Hurd - resign in August amid allegations of sexual harassment. With Hurd not having been found to do much wrong, there was a feeling that the HP board just wanted him out, one that was voiced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who had hired Hurd himself within a month.
But the lack of a CEO did nothing to slow down the shopping spree HP had been on throughout the economic crisis. This time it elected to step in and out-bid rival Dell for virtualized storage company 3PAR. This precipitated a good old fashioned bidding war between the two, culminating in HP paying over a billion dollars more for 3PAR than Dell had originally offered.
In the smartphone market, gaming was emerging as an increasingly important differentiating feature. Sony Ericsson was rumoured to be working on a PlayStation-branded phone, which was subsequently conformed, and Microsoft revealed that it expects gaming to be one of the major strategic advantages to WP7.
Meanwhile BlackBerry attempted to claw back some of the smartphone market share it was losing to the likes of Apple and Android with the launch of the Torch. But within a week it had cut the price of the handset, after disappointing initial sales.
The ARM vs. Intel rivalry took a new turn as a new chip company - Smooth-Stone - revealed itself, which plans to use ARM architecture to make server chips. This had previously been considered an unlikely direction for the low-power chip ecosystem, as performance was the primary requirement of server chips. But with power and cooling forming an increasingly large proportion of the cost of running a data centre, it looks like there is a market for low-power server chips.
Intel's concurrent move, considered to be designed to strengthen its position in the embedded market, was to bid for security software giant McAfee. The chip giant also announced an addition to its mobile software collaboration with Nokia, but there was still no sign of MeeGo venturing into the wild.
