Barack Obama barely has time to celebrate his historic victory in the US presidential elections before he will have to grapple with some very tough issues indeed. For one thing, his victory didn't have the usual uplifting effect on the markets, which continued on their gloomy downward way including many in telecoms and associated industries.
Mozilla isn't one of them. Its Firefox browser has outshone Google's beta version of its open source Chrome to take 20% market share.
Also, broadband research specialist Point Topic reported that consumers worldwide getting a better deal on broadband, paying 20% less than a year ago. However, there might be storm clouds gathering.
Frontier Communications, a rural broadband provider in the US, has announced it intends to charge up to US$2 for each gigabyte of bandwidth used over a new 5Gb cap. The regulator might have something to say about that.
Japanese mobile giant NTT DoCoMo is also rethinking its business in the light of tough economic conditions and increasingly competition from the likes of whippersnapper Softbank. It is to shift the direction of its business to focus on personalising services and developing converged services, with an emphasis on mobile video.
Someone else is desperately in need of a new focus. The apparently never-ending Yahoo saga goes on, and on. Google cut and run rather than get into an anti-trust spat with various regulatory bodies over its proposed advertising tie-up with Yahoo.
Yahoo has said it is still for sale (see today's news stories) and invited Microsoft back for another round of talks, but Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO says he's not interested.
It difficult to understand why Ballmer tried so very hard to acquire Yahoo fewer than six months ago as a big strategic move, but isn't interested now when he could surely drive a harder bargain. Could it be pique‾
You know its bad when Bellwether Cisco is obliged to warn that profits could fall 10% this quarter due to the credit crunch, although overall, its veteran CEO John Chambers remained characteristically upbeat.
There wasn't much to be cheerful about at Nortel though. It announced it might have to cut up to 5,000 jobs, while Norway's incumbent Telenor has been forced to rethink its grand plan for India by alarmed shareholders. Telenor's share price has fallen 70% this year.
Even mighty Nokia said it will cull 600 jobs and redouble its efforts in emerging markets.
Let's hope plummeting interest rates and the optimism surround President-Elect Obama has a positive effect soon.