Alcatel-Lucent drops WiMax to cut costs

In today's podcast: Alcatel-Lucent drops WiMax to cut costs; Intel invites developers to use parallelism; and Microsoft may preannounce weak earnings.

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Alcatel-Lucent will cut its investment in WiMax as it tries to reduce costs. Instead, it will pin its fourth-generation mobile broadband hopes on the rival LTE technology aimed at telecommunications operators, it said Friday. The telecommunications sector is going through some tough times: Alcatel-Lucent expects the market for equipment and related deployment services to drop by between 8 percent and 12 percent at constant exchange rates, forcing manufacturers to adapt their business plans.

Intel is inviting programmers to develop programs that can take advantage of the parallel computing capabilities on its future multicore processors. By providing software tools, Intel wants to get programmers to build software that takes advantage of the large number of cores and multithreading capabilities in its upcoming Larrabee processor to execute and run a larger number of tasks at once. The beginning of its efforts to attract programmers came earlier last week when it released a beta version of Intel Parallel Composer, which the company calls its "first" software tool that allows Windows developers to adopt parallelism for multicore computing.

Microsoft may have to warn Wall Street that it will fall short of its expectations for its fiscal 2009 second quarter because of the flagging PC market, according to financial analysts who follow the company. Several analysts, including Morgan Stanley's Adam Holt, expect that Microsoft could preannounce negative earnings before it reveals its second-quarter financials on Jan. 22, 2009, something it has not done since 2000. The company would be another victim of the current economic recession in the U.S., which has negatively affected the PC market on which Microsoft's key business segments depend. Microsoft's second quarter ends Dec. 31.

Softening demand for a wide range of products has taken its toll on the worldwide semiconductor industry, which recorded an estimated revenue decline of US$12 billion for 2008 compared to last year, Gartner said in a study released on Friday. Semiconductor companies are feeling the effects of constrained budgets and a slowdown in demand for products like cars, consumer electronics and PCs, which has resulted in lower revenue. The automotive industry meltdown has particularly hit the semiconductor industry hard because of a slowdown in demand for cars, which use many electronic components.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.