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The New York Times reports that News Corporation is bringing MySpace to China as a start-up venture. The venture will be headed by Luo Chuan, who managed MSN’s China portal.

MySpace China hopes to surpass over 100 competitors in the Chinese social networking market. The default first friend for these MySpace users will not be Tom - it will be a Chinese friend.

From the Christian Science Monitor: a blow-by-blow account of a 90-year old typewriter repairman’s work day.

I sometimes use typewriters as an example of legacy hardware that may be obsolete but must be maintained.

Sometimes companies must give customers products that feel familiar in order to create a competitive advantage and fulfill existing key success factors. IBM typewriters were very popular in corporations. Users loved the keyboards!

For many years, the IBM PC keyboard used the same “clicky” keypress technology as IBM’s electric typewriters. Early versions of the IBM PC could be connected to an IBM Selectric typewriter to print high quality documents.

Photo courtesy of Selectric.org

Photo courtesy of PC Magazine.

Business Week’s Steve Rosenbush filed a story today about the IT services industry. This includes a wide range of services, from colocation to outsourced services.

The enterprise sector of this industry is dominated by large consulting services firms, including units of EDS, IBM and CSC. It seems that private investors are interested in buying out some of these major publicly-held IT services companies soon. There are over 1000 firms that might be candidates for acquisition, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

This is the kind of acquisition that the Carlyle Group made when they purchased Hawaiian Telcom from Verizon. Carlyle also owns One Wilshire, which I discussed on February 22.

Sometimes the private owners will flip the company for a profit after a few years. In other cases, the company is split into pieces and sold at a profit. In both cases, layoffs, reorganization, and change are part of the agenda.

It remains to be seen if HawTel can generate enough revenue to satisfy its new owners. The Business Week article mentions that private investors tend to use a 20% internal rate of return (IRR) as one benchmark of performance, based upon projections of future earnings. A 2006 quarterly loss figure of US$44 million, compared to the US$1.6 billion purchase price, didn’t help matters.

HawTel’s eroding landline business needs help. I discussed on November 16 how HawTel has had to switch consultants in its systems integration project. Last May, it became apparent that HawTel was sending bills out late, which led to HawTel’s changing plans.

In December 2005, Stewart Yerton of the Star-Bulletin wrote about the company’s “Save the Line” campaign to keep current its landline customers.

The company’s recent delay of its IPTV rollout to 2008 doesn’t help matters. IPTV would let HawTel compete against Time Warner Cable for pay television subscribers, by sending television signals through HawTel’s landline network.

USA Today reported Thursday that Samsung and Microsoft have signed a cross-licensing agreement for consumer electronics patents.

Samsung’s mobile phones have become popular in the US. More of these phones include a digital music player. Microsoft needs to get more of its mobile software on these platforms, even if sales volume of its Zune audio player has brisk.

Cross-licensing agreements are one commonly used method for companies to share technology.

Wired News editor Michael Calore spent a month using Google’s web applications instead of Microsoft Office. Overall, it worked for him, but he had to jump through hoops to translate files for Microsoft users.

I’ve written about Google apps in my March 7 and February 23 posts. Web-based apps make sense for businesses, as long as employees have plenty of bandwidth and IT is aware of the security issues.

While Calore wasn’t able to use a Google presentation app in his experiment, Google is releasing one this summer according to Google’s blog, eWeek and Wired News. It looks like Google’s slideshow app will import and save PowerPoint (PPT) files. Compatibility with the market leader is a key success factor.

I won’t miss PowerPoint at all.

I just hope TurnItIn.com and WebCT start supporting Google document formats soon.