Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times could shut down this year (Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times podem fechar este ano)

O post abaixo vem do blog de Don Dodge, da Microsoft.  O deterioração das condições financeiras dos jornais tradicionais é cada vez mais visível. 

E o que estará acontecendo com os 3 jornais de Pernambuco?  Quem chegará a 2014 (ou seja, mais 5 anos à frente) dizendo que sobreviveu?

Façam suas apostas!

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Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times could shut down this year

Newspapers are in big trouble. Rupert Murdoch thinks Google is the problem, saying “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.” Fred Wilson responds; “Google is distribution. It is the newsstand. If Rupert or any other newspaper owner chooses to take its content out of the Google index, there will be plenty of content left that can take its place.”
The Seattle Post Intelligencer and Christian Science Monitor shut down their print newspapers, but have online editions. The Rocky Mountain News shut down completely. The Boston Globe will be shut down unless the unions agree to $20M in cost cuts. The Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers owned by the holding company filed for bankruptcy last week. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are also in bankruptcy. The Washington Post and New York Times have announced lay-offs and cost cutting measures. The San Francisco Chronicle lost $50M last year and just last month their unions agreed to cut 150 jobs and other cost cuts. The blog Paper Cuts reports there were 15,866 layoffs at US newspapers in 2008 and another 7,979 so far in 2009.
Newspapers have been losing money and market share for the past 10 years. Classified ads and Employment ads, huge money makers for newspapers, have been moving online to sites like craigslist and Monster.com. News is freely available on hundreds of online sites. This coupled with a deep recession that has slashed advertising budgets, has caused many newspapers to fail.
Newspapers were once a money machine. Big city newspapers had economies of scale not available to smaller town newspapers. The New York Times purchased the Boston Globe on Oct. 1, 1993, for $1.1 billion. Hearst Corp bought the San Francisco Chronicle for $660M in 1999. Now both papers are on the brink of failure.
TechMeme is my morning newspaper for tech news. There are many other online news aggregators that collect stories from newspapers, magazines, and blogs. All the major newspapers and TV networks have their own web sites with continuous news updates.
How can newspapers respond? Stick to their roots…local news. Stories about local politics, schools, sports, businesses, and events are not available from the big national news outlets. Hyper local news, at the neighborhood level, written by local people, will attract a local audience. Some newspapers have discontinued daily newspapers in favor of twice a week plus a Sunday paper. This reduces the costs of printing and distribution. There are no easy answers.
The economics of the newspaper business model have changed very quickly…faster than many of them have been able to adjust. It is almost inconceivable that the Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, or San Francisco Chronicle could go out of print. But, it is a very real possibility in 2009.

Why IBM Needs Sun (Por quê a IBM precisa da Sun?)

Ao mesmo tempo em que produzia o post anterior (sobre o não acordo IBM-Sun) fiquei me perguntando: mas qual seria o real interesse da IBM em comprar a Sun?  Não levei 2 minutos para encontrar a resposta. E ela vem de um post de hoje da revista Technology Review, do MIT, EUA (ver abaixo)!

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Monday, April 06, 2009

Why IBM Needs Sun

Insiders at both companies say that it has much to do with Sun’s intellectual property.

By Robert X. Cringley

Credit: Technology Review

After weeks of private negotiations, IBM was poised to buy rival Sun Microsystems for a reported $7 billion. Negotiations apparently broke down on Sunday when Sun’s board regected a reduced offer. But beyond allowing IBM to reclaim from Hewlett-Packard the title of world’s biggest computer company, why would the company even want Sun, a sprawling Unix vendor that has struggled for years to even show a profit? The answer, according to insiders at both companies, lies in Sun’s intellectual property.

Not only would Sun be IBM’s largest acquisition ever, but the buy is out of character for the staid mainframe company, which has for several years worked to streamline itself and become a very profitable vendor of computer and Internet services. But sometimes a deal comes along that’s simply too good to pass up. Despite years of losses, Sun has continued to spend an average of $3 billion per year on research and development. Sun also has a huge patent portfolio that might have unique value to IBM, the world’s largest and arguably most aggressive licensers of technical IP, according to experts in IP licensing.

The parts of Sun that have most value to IBM are the Java programming language, Solaris (Sun’s version of the Unix operating system), the MySQL open-source database, and certain virtualization and cloud-computing components.

IBM has already made a huge commitment to Java, a language that it doesn’t control. Now almost 15 years old, Java has come into its own as a platform for mobile computing and server applications. “As a high-level language, Java is ideal for applications that are intended to run for weeks and months at a time without having to restart,” says Paul Tyma, former senior developer of server software at Google and now chief technical officer at Home-Account, an Internet startup in San Francisco. “Compared to older languages like C++, Java is ideal for large enterprise applications,” he adds. “The longer it runs, the better it runs.”

Java is also the dominant development environment for applications running on more than one billion mobile phones–an area of computing that is not only growing like crazy, but, with mobile devices being replaced every 18 months, evolving like crazy. Now IBM will have a crucial piece of that new business.

IBM already has its own version of the Unix operating system, called AIX, but Sun’s Solaris has larger market share and runs on a broader selection of hardware than AIX, which is aimed primarily at very big systems. But there’s an additional attraction to Solaris, one that is critical primarily for legal reasons.

For years, IBM has been dogged by a lawsuit from the tiny SCO Group of Lindon, UT. SCO holds certain rights to the UNIX operating system acquired from Novell and before that AT&T, and the company claims that IBM is responsible for allowing certain SCO UNIX code (and possibly AIX code) to be inserted in Linux, an open-source version of Unix that IBM has been involved in developing. While IBM has the upper hand in the SCO suit, which has been ongoing since 2003, it has become clear that some code commingling has taken place, which could hurt future copyright and intellectual-property claims over software developed for Linux and AIX. Sun’s Solaris, however, has taken an entirely separate development path and is free of any such taint. In other words, its DNA is clean. Given the years of SCO litigation, this has value for IBM.

Both Sun and IBM are major players in the Unix workstation market. If there are antitrust concerns about this merger they will probably center on the intersection of those hardware businesses.

IBM already owns the DB2 SQL database, while Sun paid $1.1 billion last year to buy MySQL, the most popular open-source SQL database around. Owning this would potentially give IBM new advantages at both ends of the market and help the company compete better against Oracle Corporation, its chief database rival.

Cloud computing, in which applications run in data centers on hundreds or thousands of servers, is an important new computing market. Cloud computing is dependent on virtualization–software that allows several operating systems to run at one time on servers used in the cloud. IBM has recently made several significant announcements about cloud computing and server virtualization. But announcements alone aren’t enough, according to sources inside IBM. Sun has virtualization and cloud-computing software that will allow IBM to deliver what it has promised.

No wonder IBM is so interested in Sun.

IBM deal off: Sun’s shares head back down to $5 (O não-acordo da IBM: Preço da ação da Sun volta para US$ 5,00)

Mais um de http://www.bloggingstocks.com/. Desta vez a notícia é sobre o vai-e-vem das negociações para sobreviver a atual crise financeira internacional.  Mas o curso das coisas parece óbivo: na indústria de TICs mundial a concentração parece ser o rumo natural das coisas.

E os big players estão dando as cartas. Como manifesto sempre aos meus alunos, é o momento adequado para aplicar a Teoria dos Jogos, e ficar observando o comportamento estratégico destes players!

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IBM deal off: Sun’s shares head back down to $5

Posted Apr 6th 2009 7:00AM by Douglas McIntyre

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has walked out on its deal to buy Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) — or could just be using hardball negotiations to have its way on the price it is willing to pay. Word is that Sun’s board is divided over the value of IBM’s offer.

In either case, the value of Sun’s stock is likely to go back to where it traded before the IBM buy-out rumor hit the street. That would be under $5. The stock closed at $8.49 on Friday.

According to Reuters, “The collapse of the talks, if final, would come as a surprise to Wall Street, which had seen the deal as a means for Sun’s survival, as well as a way for IBM to compete more effectively against rivals like Hewlett-Packard.” It would also leave Sun, one of the worst-managed tech companies in America, to fend for itself in a recession that has cut sharply into IT spending.

Sun has survived the last three years through cost cutting. In a good quarter over that period it has lost a modest amount of money. Since there are several larger companies competing with it for market share in the global server business, Sun’s losses could grow considerably if another suitor does not come along. That is not likely. The only other company which could use Sun as a way to buy market share is Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), and it has not had any appetite for large acquisitions.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.

How to save the Boston Globe

Os problemas dos jornais da mídia off-line estão se agravando paulatinamente.  É o impacto da mídia online, que veio para ficar!  O post abaixo é de http://www.bloggingstocks.com.

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How to save the Boston Globe

Posted Apr 5th 2009 10:00AM by Peter Cohan

The newspaper industry is in deep trouble. How so? It costs a lot to write, print, and deliver a newspaper, and with more people getting their news for free online and a plunge in advertising, costs are higher than revenues. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) bought my local newspaper, The Boston Globe, in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now threatening to shut it down unless its unions agree to $20 million in cost cuts. I don’t think this is a viable plan — instead The Boston Globe should stop producing its paper version and charge for access to its online content.

The Boston Globe is suffering from drops in circulation and advertising, and it has 13 unions propping up its costs. How bad is the pain? Its average weekday circulation fell 10% to 323,983 for the six months ending September 2008. Advertising revenues across the industry declined 16% in 2008. And the Boston Newspaper Guild — whose members include 700 editorial, advertising, and business employees — is being asked to take pay cuts and put an end to company pension contributions and lifetime job guarantees.

With advertising revenues down, the most likely way to get profitable is to cut costs — but not just from union give-backs. The good news for the Boston Globe is that its online audience is up — in 2008 the number of average unique visitors in the United States to its Boston.com site reached 5.2 million per month, up 21% from the 4.3 million per month in 2007.

The bad news is that operating costs for the New York Times Co. (The Boston Globe’s financial statements are not broken out separately) account for 95% of revenues. By closing down the dead-tree version of the The Boston Globe, I estimate that operating costs could drop to 75% of revenues.

How so? Getting rid of the newsprint version would reduce those operating costs by at least 20 percentage points of revenue — eliminating raw materials, which would cut 8% of revenues, and my rough guess is that an additional 12% of revenues (I welcome better estimates) would come from cutting the costs of people who would no longer be paid to print and deliver the dead-tree version of the paper.

For the New York Times‘s New England Media Group, which is mostly The Boston Globe — that would mean about $105 million in cost savings on its $524 million in 2008 revenue — far more than the $20 million that the New York Times Co. is trying to get from union give-backs.

Of course, this estimate assumes that all print advertising will go to the online version and that the online version remains free. Although this is an overly optimistic assumption, internet advertising does have a big advantage over print — which is that advertisers can track whether people who view their ads actually make a purchase.

As a result, in order to make up the lost revenue The Boston Globe will need to charge users for access to its online content as the Wall Street Journal does. This might not be as difficult as it would first appear. If it stopped producing a dead-tree version, The Boston Globe could roll the unfulfilled portion of its print subscriptions into online ones. Then it would face the challenge of getting others to pay for a previously-free online subscription.

Would cutting the costs of the dead-tree Boston Globe and paying for online subscriptions make it profitable? I don’t know. But if the New York Times files for bankruptcy — which it still could do since it owes $99 million from its long-term debt in 2009 and only generated $5 million in cash last year — all its contracts will be subject to renegotiation.

It may be using its tough negotiation tactics with the Boston Globe as a way to experiment with an out-of-court rethinking of its business model — as a long-time fan of the Boston Globe I hope some good ideas emerge from this effort.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can’t Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney’s Turnaround at Boeing. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.