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Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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The Intel Corporation, the semiconductor maker, lowered its profit forecast Monday for its first quarter, blaming a steep drop in prices for memory chips for the shortfall.The company said slumping prices for a type of memory called NAND flash had depressed profits more than anticipated. NAND flash is used in portable electronic devices like digital cameras and MP3 players.

Intel said its gross profit margin — a crucial measure of profitability that gauges a company’s ability to control manufacturing costs — would come in at 54 percent of revenue, plus or minus a percentage point. That was down from its previous forecast of 56 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points.

The company said its other guidance had not changed, including its expectation of $9.4 billion to $10 billion in revenue for the quarter. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial on average expect Intel to ring up sales of $9.7 billion.

Other companies have also been hurt by falling memory-chip prices. The Samsung Electronics Company’s profit sank more than 6 percent last year, dragged down by plunging prices for NAND flash chips and DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the most common type of memory chip in personal computers.

Source: NYTimes