< B>Tuesday Recap
The markets moved higher on Tuesday in a pattern similar to Mondayis trading. Trading volume was light ahead of the 9/11 anniversary and its shortened trading hours. Tuesday marked the third consecutive day of gains for the major market indexes, but the markets have yet to reveal a strong base of support for a sustained market rally.
Wednesday Trading
The markets opened late to observe the 1st anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center buildings. The markets moved higher in late-morning trading but the uptick in prices lost support in the final hour of trading. Traders in New York and investors across America were focused more on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks than the dayis stock market activity.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 21.44 to finish at 8,581.17. The S&P 500 Index shed 0.13 to close at 909.45. The NASDAQ Composite Index gave back 4.64 to end the day at 1,315.45. Apple was off $.04, standing at $14.29 when the closing bell rang.
Adobe Systems
Last week, Adobe Systems filed suit against the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) and Agfa Monotype , saying it was trying to protect the rights of users of the companyis Acrobat product to imbed fonts in PDF documents. The two organizations claim Acrobatis ability to imbed fonts violates portions of the Millennium Copyright Act. Prior to the release of Photoshop many years ago, Adobe Systems was best known as a font maker and the developer of the PostScript language that helped launch the desktop computer revolution.
Adobe Systems and Apple Computer have shared a sometimes acrimonious but symbiotic relationship over the past twenty years. The start-up of Adobe Systems was originally funded in part by an investment from Apple Computer. Today Adobe is racing to gain ground in the page layout software market against Quark, the private developer of the popular Xpress page layout product. Xpress holds a commanding lead over Adobe InDesign in market share among professional designers. Adobe hopes Adobe InDesign 2.0, which is Mac OS X compatible, will help the company gain important market share. Quark has been unable to complete work on a Mac OS X compatible version of Xpress. In Wednesday trading Adobe closed $19.18, down $.11 on the day. The company will be releasing its quarterly earnings report following the market close on Thursday.
Apple
Rendezvous
On Tuesday Apple announced that several major technology and consumer electronics companies will be incorporating Appleis Rendezvous technology in their products. Apple has decided to push Rendezvous as an open standard for networking tools that will transparently identify items on a network such as printers, etc., without the need for user intervention. Appleis decision to push Rendezvous as an industry standard and open the technology to third parties has been praised by product developers and hardware manufacturers. Please read more about Rendezvous in our TMO report.
Mac OS X Only
In a sign of the times, Apple has announced that beginning in 2003 new Apple hardware will no longer boot into OS 9 (see the full TMO report for more information). However, support for so-called Classic applications (applications written for OS 9 but run on top of OS X in an OS 9 emulation layer) will still be available in Appleis Unix-based OS. According to Apple, the company desires to reduce the system resource load on Macintosh computers by eliminating the OS 9 boot feature. In as much as Apple is giving users who stubbornly cling to OS 9 as their primary operating a few months to purchase new hardware, the company is also sending a signal to developers that the transition to OS X is now over and that continued work on OS 9 products should be brought to an end.
Dell
According to a Reuters report, Dell Computer has plans to enter the market for handheld computers sometime next year, but a Dell executive when questioned earlier today did not specify a date for the computer giantis entry into the handheld market. Dell Computer continues to gain market share in a challenging economic market for PC makers and may soon return to the leadership position in word-wide PC sales. Dell lost the world-wide sales crown to HP upon the completion of the HP-Compaq merger. Dell finished Wednesday trading at $26.45, down $.18 on the day.
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