Out: UK and London, Reasons: extremely high costs for everything, huge traffic in London area, mostly just English language skills

In: Switzerland, Reasons: lower cost also due to the lower Swiss Franc against EUR, multi-lingual, highly qualified labour force, very low corporate taxes (can even be negotiated)

Yahoo follows a range of other tech companies such as Google, EA, Cisco but also IBM, HP and Microsoft.

In forums discussing the recent reports that both Dell and HP are in talks with Linux OS providers to pre-install Linux, even on laptops, the comments, naturally enough in the IT community, are mostly enthusiastic.

I for my part will check that out in more detail before going down the path of using a Linux laptop as well. I well remember the efforts it took to get Red Hat installed on a PC some years ago (in fact I did not get it running fully since some drivers were simply either not available or not working on the HP desktop).

That cautious approach will be the norm for most business PC users, I would think, but if both Dell and HP indeed start offering a choice between Windows and Linux as OS we can be sure at least that the laptop will be fully working right out of the box. The other matter is of course the support for applications. While simple office-type applications should present the smallest problem, I would think (roughly speaking), it becomes more of a challenge with other application types. I recall a customer of ours who installed Webex on his Linux PC and while it took me 10 min or so to be up and running on my Windows laptop he was working on it for 2 hours, I think, before the damn thing would do what he wanted. No ordinary user - even most power end users - would put up with that.

Of course if Linux becomes more widespread we can assume that most application vendors will be forced to provide plug-and-play support for Linux as well. But the other issue with Linux is that there is not one Linux version but many. So application support depends on whether you have Red Hat, Novell or some other entirely different product. This is also something that the anti-Microsoft and pro-Linux camp often just forgets to mention, giving the impression to the non-IT experts, that there is just one Linux out there. Interop between the different Linux vendors is worse I would guess than between Mac and Windows OSes. Overall if DELL and HP take this path then we will see - finally - real competition for Microsoft and you better watch and maybe sell any MS shares you might have - but there is no rush since it will take a few years.

As reported by IDC and Gartner, HP managed to become the number one computer seller in the last quarter of 2006, and with that catch up with Dell for 2006 year-end results. Looks like as if HP was able to take away business from Dell primarily, as they were able to grow by 23.9% whereas Dell sold 8.7% less in Q4 2006.

For EMEA they report the following:

PC shipments in EMEA totaled 80.3 million units in 2006, a 10.8 percent increase from 2005. The region ended the year with a strong fourth quarter, as shipments totaled 25.7 million units, an 11.9 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2005. In the fourth quarter of 2006, the EMEA PC market suffered from weaker demand in Western Europe, in particular from Germany and the Nordic countries. The impending arrival of Vista seemed to have little effect on consumer demand, except to keep prices lower; consumers continued to purchase PCs at the entry level price points.