Big blue is heading for another stouch with the unions after talks over a new enterprise agreement collapsed, after six long months of negotiations and some industrial action. Union officials have retaliated by refusing to rule out more strike action, even threatening to involve comrades from other IBM offices around the world into the fray. It's a common tactic - does anyone remember the waterfront dispute when the maritime union flexed its muscle and caused a brief, albeit, effective blockade at Patrick Stevedoring in Melbourne? This row centres on a new enterprise agreement covering all workers by IBM GSA, a new outsourced division. Given that there's no IT union in Australia, the CPSU, which is leading the fight, is unlikely to draw support from others within the sector, so the rift to remain IBM's headache.
It's one mishap after another for Telstra. Barely had it got over the severing of one lifeline, when another came crashing down. The slicing of its east coast fibre optic cable, which left a million people without telephone, Internet and data access, was followed this week by a BigPond outage. With more than 800,000 subscribers, the day-long network meltdown has raised questions again about the telco's redundancy options. Telstra is currently reviewing what can be done to limit any future chaos. With the ISP market neck and neck in Australia, it might do well to fixed problems before BigPond takes another bath.
Nokia executives are puzzled by a hoax which was distributed to the Australian media, claiming the phone giant was recalling its Nokia 8210 and Nokia 8250 mobile phones - two of its most popular models - due to "reception problems". The villians had a few journos fooled when the fake fax arrived with Nokia logo, although the corporate layout was a little out of wack. The company says those behind the mischief (a disgruntled user?) intended to cause damage beyond Australia by issuing the release to media in Asia Pacific. After initial panic, the PR team declared the hoax contained. The drama provided plenty of fodder for headline writers including "Nokia survives phoney recall" and "Wrong number - Nokia hit by false recall".
