IBM, Microsoft, Google and Verizon

Obama Likely to Name Google’s Eric Schmidt as Commerce Secretary

March 19, 2011

Business Insider - The word in Washington is that President Obama is close to naming departing CEO Eric Schmidt as the nation’s next Secretary of Commerce.

Mr. Schmidt picked up an important vote of confidence earlier this week when former Reagan Administration Commerce Department counsel Clyde Prestowitz essentially endorsed Schmidt for the job. That didn’t happen by accident and it’s a strong signal that the GOP DC establishment will support a Schmidt appointment. Such support would almost certainly insure a smooth confirmation process.

Mr. Schmidt is available to take this assignment. At the end of January, Google announced that he would shortly be leaving his CEO position. His last day is set for April 4, when cofounder Larry Page will take over.

Schmidt was at Google for 10 years, and reportedly decided to leave after battling Google’s cofounders over its decision to pull out of China. The company left China due to in part to free speech battles, and in part because Chinese hackers were attacking Google.

A final decision is expected within the next two weeks. The outgoing Commerce Secretary, former Washington Governor Gary Locke, was nominated by President Obama to serve as the US Ambassador to China.

Gmail Accidentally Resetting Accounts, Years of Correspondence Vanish into the Cloud?

February 27, 2011

engadget.com - If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on.

While we haven't experienced the issue personally, we're hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We'll soon see if this is a momentary setback... or a lengthy wakeup call.

Update: No fix yet, but Google's revised its estimate as to how many users might have been affected by the issue -- "less than 0.08%" -- which means we're probably looking at closer to 150,000 individuals, rather than 500,000. We're assuming that the revised estimate means that the initial count wasn't precise, and not that customers are ditching Gmail in droves.

Update 2: Google's provided promising but terribly vague guidance on when the situation will be resolved: "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change."