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A shockwave of disbelief rippled across the globe with Steve Jobs resigning from his post as CEO of Apple. Incredulous fans tweeted frantically while news headlines were flooded with the news. Jobs has named Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook as the new CEO.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know… Unfortunately, that day has come,” Jobs wrote. Following his announcement, Apple stock fell 5.4% in after-hours trading and left people wondering doubting the fate of the computer giant company.

At age 30 he was asked to leave Apple, but at 56 he resigned on his own terms! He will continue as Chairman of the Board, but a visionary like Steve Jobs can never be replaced in the role of CEO. He redefined Apple’s success with ever-new creations, each one better than the last. His aura always emanated dynamism and he would hold audiences spellbound with his ideas and creativity on stage and off it!

According to Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD, “Jobs, while seriously ill, is very much alive. Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day.”

While critics predict a difficult journey ahead for Apple, this by no means is its end. Jobs has certainly given the company its strong foundations with sensational products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad and Cooks certainly has his work cut out for him, but Apple will hold its own in the end.

On Monday, August 15, 2011, came Google’s announcement that it is buying Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. for $12.5 billion approximately, making it Google’s largest acquisition. This shows that the internet giant is now serious about expanding and going beyond its core business interest to compete directly with other mobile phone makers.

Google has said it will pay $40 per share in cash for Motorola—a 63% premium over the closing stock price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday. What does this do for Android? So far Google has only overseen the mobile business from a distance and has not yet entered the manufacturing or design aspects in a major way.

“Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers,” Larry Page, Google’s CEO, said in a statement.

Now with Motorola to shine the light on it, the Android operating system will have better armor in the form of patents to protect its manufacturing partners, such as HTC and Samsung, from major tech players Apple and Oracle. The latter have sued either Google or its partners over the past few months in order to blanch out the competition or simply to extract licensing fees!

Consumers sure can look forward to better smartphone technology and a better product from Google and Motorola now, though carriers have less to look forward to, what with one more super-powered manufacturer to deal with!

Hot on the heels of the news that rating agencies Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s lowered the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+, comes now the insult to the injury with China now spewing venom on the Obama administration and confidently expressing that the world needs another reserve currency that can replace the dollar!

The U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency and the U.S. debt became the collateral for supporting global finance. Now of course critics are raging loud!

China owns US government bonds worth a whopping $ 1.1 trillion, while China’s foreign exchange reserve exceeds $ 3.2 trillion. Experts estimate that about 60-70% of that is in dollar-denominated assets. Now American authorities are being sharply criticized for their bungling big time in preventing a decline in their credit rating.

China’s state news agency, Xinhua, emphasizes that no longer can US “loan themselves the amount necessary to get out of the financial mess they have created in the first place…The world should be looking for a new reserve currency to replace dollar.”

Japan, which is the second largest creditor to the U.S., and South Korea, the two prominent partners to the U.S. have taken this statement rather calmly. A representative of the Japanese authorities has said on terms of anonymity that, “The credibility of the US government T-Bills and the investment in them will not diminish after this event.”

Russia, however, seems to have taken the greatest impact of this crisis. Though Moscow is pretending to have no reason to worry, fall in trading by 3% soon after it started shows the obvious effects. Moreover, due to exchange rate differences the National Fund in Russia has lost greater than 108 billion rubles.

Now it remains to be seen how the cookie crumbles for the rest of the world with it literally baking in the U.S. financial crisis!

Facebook has managed to leapfrog MySpace by a mile and a double with over 700 million members, 157 million visitors in the month of May alone, and an ad revenue of $2.2 billion!

How did it happen that a business which started in a Harvard dorm room overpowered and brought down to its knees another that was started long before and even had corporate backing?

a) One theory goes that “Facebook was more effectively designed to appeal to young Internet users than MySpace was.”b) Another theory is that News Corp. simply “did not understand the Internet well enough to steer MySpace toward regular Internet users, and instead tried to use the social network as an instrument to promote its Fox products.”c) Or was it the advertising clutter on MySpace that did it in? MySpace struck an advertising deal with Google and since then the site was replete with marketing messages.

What do you think it was?

Once again internet wars between Google and China continue to fuel the political cinders. A cyberattack has been launched by China with a breach of Gmail accounts of hundreds of high-profile individuals in several nations, or at least that is what the tech giant claimed on June 1, 2011.

U.S. and United Kingdom military officials, just a day prior to this, acknowledged that nation-spurred cyberattacks could be an act of war. With reports of frequent break-ins at major defense operations and other similar disclosures, one wonders if there is some meat to these claims.

Google is calling it a deliberate attempt to mar the Gmail service by making the problem appear to be with the service itself. Google representatives stated “We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.” Eric Grosse, engineering director of Google’s security team, said that in a campaign to collect Gmail users’ passwords, the hackers targeted the accounts of “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”

However, Google is not new to this in the country. Since 2006 when they first entered the Chinese market the two have exchanged blows that seem one too many. Even so, Google has had to submit to the demands of the eastern giant time and again. The Chinese market is just too large to erase and forget and so Google succumbed to the Chinese demands and applied censorship policy to the Google.cn service.

So what one wonders is that Google doing it again?—going down on its knees in the face of losing a market of 338 million customers, because in spite of the cyberattack claims from the Chinese, it hasn’t as yet struck back. Google perhaps has come to terms with the fact that it has landed in a ‘hot-and-sour’ soup by entering this market and must keep a defensive stance, knowing what is at stake.

Another debate that this entire episode has sparked off is that of whether this whole cyberattack was a “phishing” attempt or was it “hacking”? What do you think? Is it phishing, hacking, or an ACT OF WAR? Tell us all your views!

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