Good Week

In January 2004, storage giant EMC made what some thought was an unusual move in doling out $625m to acquire VMware, a pioneer in virtualisation software for x86 servers. After all, what could a firm that sold disks know about this new field based on commodity boxes? Last week, Intel took a $218.5m stake in VMware but for that large outlay, the chip behemoth got just 2.5 percent of the company. At the same time, VMware announced its own IPO filing and many watchers believe that a $10bn valuation is likely to be reached – a nice little earner for EMC.

Bad Week

Web sites that count page views to demonstrate their huge popularity suffered a blow last week. Ratings firm Nielsen NetRatings will no longer use these as a primary gauge, so we won’t have to attempt to figure out those mind-boggling numbers. Instead, NN will use another unreliable indicator – time spent at sites. Unfortunately, most alternative guides are also vulnerable to being horribly gamed. The change is being occasioned by new(ish) technologies that affect the way sites work with media streams that automatically refresh, and Ajax code that can update elements rather than whole pages.

Word of the Week

Crapware. This unlovely term was only christened recently but the concept might already be on its way out after Dell announced a PC line dubbed Vostro. The new range goes some way towards dispensing with the icons that resemble an outbreak of boils on even the most box-fresh systems. Good riddance to “free” anti-malware, media players, ISP trials and their entire ilk.