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In the news this week

11.July.08

A look at what's been happening in the world of business.

It's been quite a busy week business-wise so I thought I'd give you an overview of what's been happening this week.

Probably the biggest piece of news is that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is stepping down after 33 years of involvement with the company. He won't be leaving entirely, though - he'll still spend a day a week at Microsoft on special technology projects. The rest of his time he will be devoting to his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps tackle AIDS, malaria and other global health as well as social issues.

Next up is some news from the gaming industry. It transpires that Sony has lost $3.3bn on their Playstation 3. That seems to be largely due to the fact that they sold it at under cost price in order to regain market share from the Microsoft Xbox 360 which had been launched a year earlier. A costly strategy and it remains to be seen if Sony will recoup some of those losses through the sale of actual games for the Playstation.

In an interesting development Air France is looking at getting into the railway business, specifically the high-speed rail market . There is speculation that this is due to rising fuel costs - these may adversely affect the airline market both in the short and longer terms, leading travellers to take more trains instead. A wise move on Air France's behalf then?

Google meanwhile may be getting itself into trouble in the UK. It has started taking photos of UK streets for its Street View mapping tool. The idea behind Street View is that it matches photos of locations to its maps so that you can zoom into a street and see a 360 degree photo of it, including the faces of any people that were on the street at the time the photo was taken (it's already available in the US ). The problem Google is facing is UK privacy laws. While in the US it is legal to take photos of people on public streets (and, presumably, display those images publicly), there is a question about whether this is legal in the UK, at least for commercial purposes. More details about the situation are available here .

And finally a glimmer of hope with regards to the credit-crunch and economic downturn. According to a survey by Hay Group and the Centre for Economic and Business Research, the economy will continue to slow down for another 18 months and then recover. Let's hope they're right!

All the best

Eric