Retail: Interviews

Harvey Norman started as a lone shopfront in the Western suburbs of Sydney. Now customers from as far afield as Northern Ireland and Slovenia can shop at its retail stores and super centres. But staying on top has never been easy, as the company’s computers and communications general manager, Luke Naish, well knows.

When John Barbuto (JB) opened up his first shop in East Keilor, Victoria in 1974, his philosophy was to provide a specialist range of hi-fi products and recorded music to the public.

In the final part of an in-depth interview with ARN's BRIAN CORRIGAN, local Kyocera Mita managing director, David Finn, assesses the role of resellers in managed print services.

In the second part of an in-depth interview with ARN's Brian Corrigan, local Kyocera Mita managing director, David Finn, talks about the printer-maker's green credentials.

In a surprise move, Paramount and DreamWorks Animation announced this week that they would align themselves exclusively with the HD DVD high-definition format. The controversial decision has attracted a lot of attention, and not just because it comes at a time when market indicators have been pointing to competitor Blu-ray Disc as having the lead (disc sales have been running 2-1 in Blu-ray's favour).

A new generation of high-definition TV and DVD technology heralds the arrival of the digital living room, according to the head of Taiwanese media software maker CyberLink, Alice Chang. Users love high-definition TV because it's like watching a football game from the sidelines, while HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the high-definition video disc formats, put the cinema in your house and offer fun new possibilities. For example, the HD-DVD version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen includes a shoot 'em up game users can play. Bad guys don't die when hit, but the game does keep the score. Tokyo Drift includes a function that puts the story cards used to make the movie in the top left corner of the corresponding scene, giving users a glimpse of the creative process. And that's just the beginning, Chang said. One function her company is working on could one day let users buy items they see in movies on the click of a mouse. So instead of wondering where 007 picked up that suave tuxedo, or Carrie Bradshaw got her new shoes, users can click on them and buy immediately at Amazon.com or eBay. Here's what else Chang had to say.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's keynote this year at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) put the company's newest power broker at center stage: Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices division. Bach is the man behind Microsoft's Xbox, which at the time of its launch was a big risk and departure for the company. Xbox has gone on to become one of Microsoft's most successful consumer products, and Bach now is in charge of charting Microsoft's future strategy to give consumers real-time, always-available access to content over IP networks.

Jessica Arnold is Microsoft's product manager for Outlook 2007, the e-mail component of Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. Microsoft has made several improvements in this latest version, such as faster search, RSS feed reading and user interface enhancements, such as a new to-do bar, that are getting buzz among beta testers and analysts. In a survey of IT users we released earlier this month, more respondents rated improvements in Outlook 2007 "very important" than those in Word 2007, Excel 2007 or any other part of the Office 2007 suite. Arnold spoke with Eric Lai on Wednesday. An edited transcript follows.

As the IT industry changes to keep pace with convergence and the rise of emerging markets, vendors like Hewlett-Packard have to stay one step ahead of the curve to remain competitive. At HP, the job of directing that effort falls to Shane Robison, the company's executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, who is responsible for overseeing the company's annual US$3.5 billion (AUD$4.5 billion) research and development (R&D) budget.

Microsoft Tuesday released draft application programming interfaces designed to give independent security vendors a way to get around a kernel patch protection technology in Windows Vista. Known as PatchGuard, the Vista technology has been at the center of a simmering dispute between Microsoft and several security vendors who claim that PatchGuard hampers the ability of their products to deliver key security capabilities such as host-based intrusion detection. The technology has also been part of broader antitrust concerns in the European Union that Microsoft has been forced to respond to. Ben Fathi Microsoft's vice president for the Windows core operating system, talked about the draft APIs and the company's rationale for releasing them. Excerpts from that interview follow:

GFK Australia managing director, Gary Lamb thinks digital convergence is still some way off.

UK-born Steven Mawson, Konica Minolta's general manager for printing solutions and client services, is a man of many continents. He has spent many a moon in the African sun and discovered his love of art and graphic design while living in Zimbabwe.

Smart USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives based on U3's computing platform hit the market this week and will enable applications to run directly off the portable drives without relying on a host computer. SanDisk and Verbatim announced USB smart drives based on U3's platform, while software companies America Online and Mozilla ported applications to run on U3-compliant smart drives.

As president of Netgear, Patrick Lo has a vested interest in promoting the digitally connected home. He shared his thoughts during a recent visit to Australia.

After several years as Tech Pacific's PC and server category manager, Josh Velling has been given the task of marketing the digital home concept to the thousands of resellers signed up to the new look Ingram Micro. Velling spoke to Brett Winterford about the many exciting challenges that lie ahead as the IT and consumer electronics worlds converge.