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Stories by Peter Young

  • Acer deal stirs GST debate

    A $40 million deal negotiated by the Western Australian education department will land 14,000 Acer laptops, shorn of GST, in the homes of WA teachers.

  • Wayne's World Shrinks

    Focus Technologies, the techno-group painstakingly stitched together by ex-Sausage CEO Wayne Bos, is unravelling.

  • Derailed acquisition poses problems for Telstra

    Eisa's successful rival bid for OzEmail leaves it virtually neck-and-neck with Telstra in terms of residential Internet subscribers. Instead of an 800,000-customer behemoth dwarfing all comers, Telstra will now level peg with eisa/OzEmail at around 400,000 subscribers each.

  • Net startups a dicey proposition

    Australian venture capitalists dispensing cash at record rates to startup companies are still wary about giving Internet companies a group hug.

  • Technomart organisers red-faced

    Finger pointing and recriminations are underway after the sensational collapse of a huge Asia-Pacific technology conference. The APEC Technomart III conference may have attracted as few as 600 delegates instead of the 30,000 promised by its organisers, according to sources. Scheduled to last for five days last week, the event shut its doors after only two and the company that organised it has gone into liquidation.

  • Microsoft admits Win2000 failures

    Windows 2000 won't have all the bugs stamped out of it when it ships, confesses the man at the centre of the effort to deliver Microsoft's long-overdue new operating system.

  • Teco becomes ADM Distribution

    Taiwanese company Teco has withdrawn from its Australian software venture Teco Multimedia, and joint partner Anthony McMahon has assumed control of the distribution company's business, which will now be known as ADM Distribution.

  • Gartner predicts channel doom and gloom

    At least 10 of the top 25 Australian system, service and channel vendors will disappear either through acquisition or by withering away, while the top five enterprise resource planning (ERP) organisations will grow their market share from 55 per cent today to 80 per cent within five years. These were among the predictions espoused by Bob Hayward, Gartner Group's vice president, Asia Pacific Research in his speech at the organisation's 1998 Symposium which attracted nearly 1200 Australasian delegates this week.

  • Consumer Commission checks carrier access costs

    The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released an independent consultant's report that estimates Telstra's cost of relaying other carriers' calls on its network at 3.6 cents a minute. The report also puts today's cost of creating phone lines to households and business at up to $500 a year.

  • Comalco rethinks IBM GSA partnership

    Aside from an initiative by mining giant Comalco, Queensland's outsourcing scene shows little signs of significant activity in either the public or private sectors. Comalco is nearing final evaluation of a number of bidders on a five-year contract covering a wide range of services.

  • Macromedia consolidates tool offerings

    With its corporate focus now on Web publishing and distance learning, graphics tool vendor Macromedia is restructuring its product lines in Australia. "We have so many tools that people get confused so we are consolidating our offerings to the market here," said Macromedia Asia-Pacific director, Sein Chew.