With the tablet and smartphone market booming – partly at the expense of personal computers – investors worry that the chipmaker's setback in mobile could leave it badly positioned for future waves of mobile devices.
Netscape, which led the field not long ago in Internet browsing with its Netscape Navigator, blamed intense competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.Apple Computer surprised investors by giving advance notice of its first profit in five quarters.
It has attracted the attention not just of a sceptical mass media, but also of cryptography geeks, scammers, computer scientists, investors (or gamblers, depending on your point of view), entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, criminals, hackers, security services and law-enforcement agencies.
Armed with the right rules or computer software, investors can, it seems, earn juicy excess returns as can (and do) many of the academics who discover them, whether by trading directly or taking jobs as investment advisers.Rethinking riskYet few economists are prepared to abandon the efficient market.
As Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer marshaled forces today to defend their proposed merger into the world's largest computer company, investors continued to express skepticism about the union, taking another bite out of the companies' shares for the third consecutive day.
Elon Musk wants to connect your brain directly to a computer, and investors are ready to make that science fiction a reality.
September has been a horrid one for computer-stock investors.
"This is like the marriage of two porcupines," said Regis McKenna, a computer industry investor who was one of the Valley's best known publicists.
Windows software is still used on the majority of personal computers, but investors have criticised the company for not reacting quickly enough to the way Apple and Google have led the way in the fast-growing tablet and smartphone sectors.
Dell sank 3.2 percent as the personal computer maker told investors to expect slower sales growth for the rest of the year.
Sun Microsystems, the network computer maker, disappointed investors yesterday when it reported a profit of $12 million for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year.
