Hello,

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the What's Hot Now newsletter. It's designed to give you my personal view on most intriguing stories of the week emanating from across all our Ziff Davis properties. But we won't stop there. We've also created a new contest where you can win a $250 gift certificate in a contest where you tell us what you think the top five stories were for the past month.

Of course, the top news of the week was yet another merger with AMD agreeing to buy ATI for $5.4 billion. While this deal is getting mixed reviews on Wall Street, it makes a tremendous amount of sense when you start to think about the future of multi-core processors. We already have dual-core and quad core processors on the way, and it won't be too long before we have even more cores on a processor. If you start to think about what all the cores will be doing, it's pretty clear that a lot of them are going to be dedicated to running specific subsystems such as graphics, which long term should result in much higher levels of visual fidelity when it comes to running future generations of virtual reality applications.

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Shortly thereafter, Hewlett-Packard moved to actually put some real teeth in its software play beyond OpenView by moving to acquire Mercury Interactive. Despite a raft of bad publicity over financial misconduct, Mercury provides an attractive complement to OpenView in that it offers a base to develop a stronger set of application management capabilities that could ultimately make HP a much more viable competitor to IBM in area of utility computing.

Elsewhere on the hardware front, it's worth taking note of the story on Samsung's evolving PC plans. As a long time supplier to Dell, Samsung has kept its brand out of the PC market in the U.S. while simultaneously selling Samsung-branded PCs around the globe. Now that Dell and Samsung are set to part ways, don't be too surprised to see Samsung-branded PCs in the U.S. complementing the rest of their IT equipment in 2007.

Meanwhile, it was appropriate that Microsoft announced its commitment to 12 principles for development in Washington this week, because without any body to require the enforcement the principles are about as valuable as any other empty political promise emanating from the capital.

In terms of commentary this week, you might want to check out what Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has to say about what the open-source community can learn from Microsoft. It's nice to see somebody acknowledge that a company that has dominated the industry for the better part of two decades must be doing one or two things right.

And finally, here's a short list of some other compelling reading.

What Role Did Microsoft Play in the MySpace Outage

Baseline Article Explains How Google Works

GM CIO Pens Book on Best Practices for IT Acquisitions

Bentley Professor Explains Why Building Electronic Partner Networks Is So Damn Hard

RFID Gets Personal in Health Care Application

Mergers of IT Services Companies on the Rise

Maybe There is Hope for Multi-Vendor Customer Support After All

Best Regards,

Mike Vizard
Executive Editor
Ziff Davis Enterprise Group

What Role Did Microsoft Play in the MySpace Outage?
A power outage took Microsoft infrastructure poster child MySpace down this weekend. What happened to the companySQL Server backup/failover plans—if they had any?

Baseline Article Explains How Google Works
For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Others are starting to follow its lead. Here's why.

GM CIO Pens Book on Best Practices for IT Acquisitions
General Motors has written the book on acquiring IT goods and services—literally.

Bentley Professor Explains Why Building Electronic Partner Networks Is So Damn Hard
The secret to integrating with your business partners, according to Bentley College's M. Lynne Markus: Maximize the benefits for them, and maximize the benefits for yourself. Sounds simple, right? So why is it so hard?

RFID Gets Personal in Health Care Application
VeriChip, the company that has been developing a tiny human- implantable RFID chip under the parent company Applied Digital, has announced that Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield in New Jersey is sponsoring a two-year study that will have 280 patients injecting VeriChip's chip under the skin of their arms (somewhere between the wrist and elbow).

Mergers of IT Services Companies on the Rise
Small may be good, but big is better--at least in the eyes of an exploding number of solution providers busily buying other channel companies to bolster bottom lines, expand into new regions or markets, and gain access to additional skills.

Maybe There is Hope for Multi-Vendor Customer Support After All
Close cooperation among customer support organizations from multiple vendors is the rare exception rather than the rule, so the average customer can easily find themselves bounced around three or four different call centers without experiencing any sense of resolution. The Customer Interaction Management (CIM) Forum is a step in the right direction.