Acer's CEO Warns Microsoft To 'Think Twice' About Manufacturing The Surface Tablet

It was only a matter of time before one of Microsoft's manufacturing partners spoke up about the company's decision to go it alone in producing a tablet.

J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman and CEO told the Financial Times on Monday that he thinks Microsoft's Surface tablet will be "negative for the worldwide ecosystem" in computing.

Wang then explicitly warned Microsoft to "think twice" about manufacturing its own tablet.
“We have said [to Microsoft] think it over. Think twice," Wang said. "It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.”
Microsoft, for its part, has admitted that its decision to produce its own tablet that competes with products made by its OEM partners might lead to some tension.
Acer, in particular, appears to be angry not just at the extra competition, but at being kept so completely out of the loop. According to a separate article in the Financial Times, Microsoft didn't tell Acer about the Surface until just before the public announcement and the company still hasn't let Acer know how much the tablet will sell for.

Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Arielle Now Works For Google

Google's acquisition of Wildfire Interactive, one of Facebook's top marketing partners, is awkward for the social network on a business level.
But it's even more awkward on a personal level.
That's because one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Arielle, works for Wildfire as a junior product manager.
So she's soon going to be a Google employee, working to undermine her brother's dominance in the social sphere.
We hear Mark tried to get Arielle to join Facebook. Unlike their older sister Randi, who succumbed to Mark's entreaties and ran consumer marketing for Facebook for years before recently striking out on her own, Arielle decided to set an independent course from the get-go.
She's spoken out on her blog about Facebook's recent design changes.
And she's also active on Quora, the question-and-answer site started by some ex-Facebookers. One of the questions she answered: "Which startups would be good acquisitions for Facebook?"

Gone, Daddy, Gone: Go Daddy CEO is Out

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman is stepping down to become a special advisor for the domain-name firm. “I have reached a juncture in my life when I would like to spend more time with my family,” Adelman said in a press release outlining the move.
Scott Wagner, an executive at KKR, has been named interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor to Adelman, who has been with Go Daddy since 2002. KKR, along with Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures, bought Go Daddy last year. The deal was believed to be worth $2.25 billion.
Go Daddy, known for its envelope-pushing Super Bowl ads, recently launched an ad campaign for the Olympics that slightly toned down the brand’s characteristic raciness. Adelman told USA Today that his mission is to “evolve Go Daddy’s image from troublemaker to troubleshooter.”

In This World, A Software Engineer Gets Paid More Than The CEO

VMware's $1.26 billion acquisition of tiny startup Nicira was as much about grabbing talent as grabbing  technology, Valley insiders say.
VMware has been the target of much raiding because the timing is right. The company went public about five years ago. Early employees have likely fully vested their shares.
So says Jedidiah Yueh, CEO of Menlo Park-based Delphix. (He has a history with VMware's majority share owner, EMC, who acquired his previous startup Avamar in 2006 for $165 million. He stayed at EMC for about a year.)
His current startup Delphix is now at 100 people, many of them from VMware, he says, including VMware's former vice president of product management, Karthik Rau.
"[Why did] VMware buy a company with under $10 million in revenue for over a billion dollars? It's a talent problem," says Yueh.
There is a major and "vicious recruiting" war going on in the Valley, says Big Switch cofounder Kyle Forster. Big Switch now has 44 employees and is hiring as fast is it can. But it hasn't been easy.
Forster says he turned down six of Cisco's distinguished engineers interested in working for him because they only knew hardware. A DE is the highest technical honor a Cisco employee can earn. When Forster found a DE that also knew VMware, not only did he hire the guy, but the company is "paying him more than we pay the CEO." (Big Switch's CEO is cofounder Guido Appenzeller.)
Meanwhile, Insieme, a Cisco-backed startup, has been raiding Nicira, VMware, and other companies for talent, too, and offering insane amounts of money—reportedly up to $2 million as an eventual payoff.
Why don't they hire from within Cisco? They do, but they are also in desperate need of software engineers. Insieme is run by an engineering team well-known to Cisco: Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero. Cisco has backed them before with what's called a "spin-in" strategy, where Cisco has an option to buy the company but employees can earn startup-like paydays.
This team was responsible for Cisco's super successful server product, UCS, and its next-generation Nexus switches from a previous spin-in called Nuova Systems. But Nuova had a secret weapon: VMware cofounder Ed Bugnion. Bugnion was the guy that knew software, while the Mazzola, Jain, and Cafiero knew hardware. Bugnion left Cisco to get his PhD at Stanford about a year ago and a source close to him says he's got no plans to join Insieme.