Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech:
The Nasdaq Composite Index is down 50.63, or 1.8%, at 2,776.55 following a dispiriting jobs number�for May this morning and a tick up in the jobless rate.
Shares of Facebook (FB) are down $1.71, or almost 6%, at $27.89 this morning despite yet another positive note, this one from R.W. Baird. The broker initiated coverage of the stock at Outperform, with a $37 price target.
Reuter’s John McCrank writes this morning that the Nasdaq OMX Group, the owners of the so-named exchange, have offered no outright apology for the botched trading on Facebook’s debut, May 18th, even though customers have lost tens of millions of dollars in some cases as a result.
In case you missed it,�James Gorman, the CEO of�Morgan Stanley, the underwriter for Facebook, was on CNBC last night and he was not offering any apologies either.
Hewlett-Packard�(HPQ) saw its shares cut to Hold from Buy this morning by�Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek, who writes of a raft of worries, concluding “most of HP’s businesses will be challenged in the near to medium term. Specifically we think tablets will hurt PCs (and Windows 8 will not help), smartphones will hurt printers, and European uncertainty will hurt enterprise IT spending.”
Shares of HP are down $1, or 4.4%, at $21.68.
Reuters has more gloom on offer for�Research in Motion�(RIMM) this morning following the company’s announcement Tuesday evening that it will have a loss this quarter and several different quarters, and that it has retained�JP Morgan�to explore various options for the company. Nicola Leske and Jim Finkle write that the company’s sales of the�BlackBerry may be threatened as customers choose to buy other smartphones given the perception RIM may choose a “drastic option.”
Shares of RIM are down 27 cents, or 2.6%, at $10.06.
Microsoft (MSFT) said it would make available coupons to those eligible for an upgrade of their Windows software to the new version, Windows 8, and that it would consequently defer about $450 million to $550 million in revenue from this quarter, the fiscal Q4 that ends in June. The coupons apply to people buying new PCs with the existing Windows 7 operating system.
The coupon offer and the deferral follow Microsoft’s announcement yesterday that a “Release Preview” is now available of Windows 8. Nomura Equity Research‘s Rick Sherlund this morning said the coupon and deferral were consistent with what he was expecting, while the preview arrived a week early. He sees minor improvements in the new beta of Win 8, which may encourage more people to consider the software. The software looks on track for an October retail sale, wrote Sherlund.
Microsoft shares are down 44 cents, or 1.5%, at $28.75 this morning.
Shares of Google (GOOG) are down $9.91, or 1.7%, at $570.95 after a federal judge ruled Thursday that the company did not violate Oracle‘s (ORCL) copyright on the “application programming interface” owned by Oracle for the Java programming language.
As The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen writes this morning, judge William Alsup of U.S. Districtor Court for the Northern District of California ruled, “that APIs are more like titles and short phrases, which aren’t copyrightable. He relied on the principle that ‘functional elements essential for interoperability are not copyrightable.’”
Shares of Oracle are down 34 cents, or 1.3%, at $26.13.
No comments:
Post a Comment