Le Figaro reports that Cagni, who joined Apple in 2000, tendered his resignation Wednesday. Sources close to the company confirmed to AllThingsD that this is indeed the case, though they had no explanation for Cagni’s sudden departure.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

But after a major company-wide restructuring and the divestiture of several non-core businesses, CEO John Chambers (pictured here at D5) is finding that turning the massive Cisco ship around — something he seemed to have started two quarters ago, and which continued last quarter, isn’t coming easy.

There’s the global economy to worry about. All that messy complicated news coming out of Europe about sovereign debt and cuts in government spending around the world has a way of eating into technology budgets both at Cisco’s government customers and at its large enterprise customers.

Cisco’s guidance for the quarter ending in July was especially worrisome for investors, who promptly sent Cisco’s share price plummeting by more than 8 percent in after-hours trading. Cisco called for revenue to grow between 2 percent and 5 percent, which works out to sales in the range of $11.4 billion to $11.8 billion, well off the consensus forecast of $12 billion.

Guidance on earnings was equally disappointing. At 44 cents to 46 cents a share, the midpoint lags the consensus by two cents.

So what’s going on? I asked Chambers about it in a phone interview with AllThingD held after the conclusion of Cisco’s conference call with analysts.

AllThingsD: John, the markets clearly don’t like very much what they saw today. So, from a high level, what happened — good, bad and indifferent — with this quarter?

Chambers: The first thing from a high level is that we’re executing pretty well on our vision and strategy, and we did exactly what we said we would do. We guided for growth of 5 percent to 7 percent for the year and for the first nine months we’re at 7.5 percent [revenue]. We said profits faster than revenues, and we’re at 9.5 percent. Earnings per share increasing 13 percent year over year for the first nine months and gross margins down just 1 percent primarily on product mix. We’re winning versus our key competitors and winning at a pretty fast rate. When you’re number one or two in most product categories, holding your own in switching and making it very challenging for the Huawei’s of the world, the Junipers and Hewlett-Packards … Juniper and HP we’re pulling away from and we’ll see if we can maintain it. Huawei, for the first time we’re getting much better and competing against them and understanding their weaknesses. And if you look where we are in terms of the bigger picture, we’re in the right markets. We’re in the mobility market. We’re in video. We’re in the cloud market. We’re in the social networking segment. We’re pulling them all together, and our customers are buying the architecture in a pretty good amount. Even in service providers, where most people thought they would never move toward having preferred vendors, we’re seeing something close to that at some service providers and at many of them they are starting to think about going all-Cisco.

So on things we can control and influence I think we’re in pretty good shape. In terms of the market, I’d like to add another couple of points [of growth] in service providers, another couple of points from commercial customers. The public sector is at 3 percent. I’d take that for the year, but we think it’s going to be flat, give or take a couple points.

The issue is the enterprise. And there the problem is not that they don’t have the money or that they don’t understand that it’s important to get productivity. It’s that they’re uncertain. When they are uncertain, that’s because of economic issues primarily because of Europe. And uncertainty on government policy. Then you see people deciding not to invest. And that affects not only capital spending but jobs.

So I think the market understood what we’re saying and I think most people would give us credit for being a very good indicator of what the point in time change is. But this is not necessarily a given for what is going to happen in the second half of the year. I’m just trying to be as transparent as I know how.

The July quarter is usually your seasonally strongest. Given that your guidance was relatively weak compared to the consensus, what are we to make of the quarter coming up? Is it a secular weakness or mostly the economy? Are your competitors just taking it on the chin worse that you are?

Let’s look at Juniper. It’s down 6 percent a year and routing down 9 percent. Huawei is growing 11 percent a year, but its service provider segment is growing only 3 percent. HP’s networking business is back to the levels in their switching business to what they were when HP first bought 3Com. There’s an explosion in the data center business, it’s to the point that companies who have been there a long time like IBM or HP, we’re growing 67 percent and their servers are flat or slightly down. So the results speak for themselves in terms of what we’re doing right in some areas. But we’re learning to tie things together in a way that saves customers money, saves them time to market and allows them to achieve their business goals quicker. That is the game we’re playing for. The major thing we’re after is getting the enterprises spending again. Customers — almost uniformly — are saying that my business is okay, not great, they expect it will go up gradually, and that they’re probably going to spend more in the second half of the year than they did in the first. But immediately as a follow-up to that, they all say that’s true only if they’re not surprised by something from the economy. That’s the kind of uncertainty we’re seeing, and in talking with my peers in the industry who are in similar markets, they can finish my sentences. The question is whether it’s temporary or is it a blip? We just don’t know yet.

So given the restructuring we’ve been talking about for the last year or so, is Cisco the right size? Your overall headcount is down more than 8,000 from a year ago, but it’s up by more than 1,300 since the last quarter. Are you at the right size or are there more changes coming?

Out of the 1,353 people we added, the vast majority were either advanced services or engineers. We needed more engineers. The additions were around either building products or converting services. In terms of our organization structure, we re-did Cisco. We’ve learned from what we did well in the past, and you wouldn’t see the turnaround as quickly as we did if the structure weren’t so strong. But we needed to restructure how our customers buy, and how we build products. We needed to be nimbler and simpler in how we get decisions done. And that is a journey. In the past we tended to get a market transition, good or bad, and take off on a good one or address a bad one, and we would end up gaining market share almost always coming out of these. We’ll see if we do it again this time. But we weren’t constantly reinventing ourselves to avoid hitting the next wall or the next inflection point. That is what we’re trying to do. This is a continuous journey. While we were four or five inches around the waist, I think there’s still more work to be done in our middle levels. I think you’ll see us address that in the next year or two. Does that mean we’re going to adjust the market given that the market may have slowed? I’m not sure it has yet, we’ll know in a couple of quarters which way it’s going. The answer is, not in a major way. It’s too early to say which way this market is going. We’re not going to over-react or under-react.

You just made a major acquisition with NDS, about $5 billion. You still have a lot of cash on the balance sheet. What’s your stance on acquisitions?

Ongoing at Cisco we will do innovation through internal development, including internal start-ups, through strategic partnership, and acquisitions and intergrating all of the above. NDS is one of multiple moves that we will make, not just in the video space for us, but it was also a major cloud play for us and a major social media move if we do this right. It plays right into the sweet spot of our service providers and content providers. Our ideal target has not changed: 100 engineers with a product that is just about to come to market, where our customers say that if they were owned by Cisco they’d buy a lot of it. The $5 billion price is higher than what we’ve traditionally paid, but it’s on the order of Stratacom and Tandberg, for which we paid about $3 billion each. But our ideal target is smaller, and you’ll see us continue to be selectively active in the market.

You’re said to be heavily focused on gross margins. One point that came up on UCS: You say it’s growing like crazy, off a low base, but one of the analysts pointed out this week that it has the overall effect of bringing down the gross margin a bit. How are you addressing that?

That’s true on specifics. UCS by itself, even with a premium versus our peers, is going to be below our gross margin of 65 percent. So, by definition, as you add more of those it has a major effect on gross margin. When you combine UCS with our Nexus 2000 and 5000 switches the blended version gets the margin higher, though still not as high as the overall gross margin. Our challenge on gross margin, and the reason why we’re going to focus aggressively on each gross margin area this year, is that it’s more of a product mix issue than it is an issue of pressure on gross margins on any specific product. In terms of the base for UCS, it’s getting close to a $2.5 billion run rate and probably closer to $3 billion by now. So the base is getting larger, and in North America our market share is close to 20 percent and globally our best guess is 14 percent as best as we can tell. So that’s pretty good execution.

At this point, as he did last time we talked, Chambers asked me what song I’d pick to musically illustrate Cisco’s quarter, sticking with a tradition started a few quarters back and continued last quarter. I told him I wanted it to be a surprise, but that I think he’d like it.

This quarter, I dedicate to Cisco Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy.” The hard work of transformation done, Cisco is finding that, despite being leaner and meaner, it has still got some way to go and finds itself in a tough market. In the video below, Ringo performs with fellow Beatle George Harrison at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. As everyone at Cisco knows, nothing worth having comes easy.

Approval by the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, would represent a victory for Sony, removing the possibility of a longer review of the deal’s antitrust implications. Such a review could add several months to the process.

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Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates in its first-quarter earnings report today, with revenue of $1.08 billion and earnings of 23 cents. That’s a gain of 28 percent from a year ago in net earnings and 38 percent per diluted share.

Analysts had been expecting Yahoo to report revenue of $1.06 billion and earnings of 17 cents a share. But, as I reported earlier today, sources had indicated that the results would be on the upside.

Still, revenue was only up year over year by 1 percent — not exactly a great achievement, given exploding growth across the Internet industry. The real drag was the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, whose revenue was down 9 percent — which Yahoo attributed to the weak economy there — with its “contribution” down 27 percent. That region has been run by Rich Riley, who is now Yahoo’s sales lead in the U.S.

One interesting note: While display revenue was down, search revenue was up. And unique visitors to Yahoo were up 7 percent, which was lower growth than in previous quarters. The reason was declines in search and communications, with media up strongly.

Now, investors are hoping to get more clarity from new CEO Scott Thompson in a call at 2 pm PT about the overall strategy for the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant, which just restructured its management again and also had layoffs of 2,000 employees.

Thompson has yet to articulate a specific plan beyond the broad strokes of media, commerce and data/platforms as Yahoo’s aim.

But there is a lot more to deal with and in detail, including figuring out its troubled advertising search partnership with Microsoft, the talks around selling off parts of the company’s lucrative Asian assets, Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook, how Yahoo is going to deal with activist shareholder Third Point’s possible proxy challenge and whether more layoffs beyond recent firings will be needed.

“In the first quarter, Yahoo!’s results came in at the high end of our guidance range and beat consensus on revenue and profits,” Thompson said in a statement. “We also made changes to resize the organization and establish a new leadership structure to quickly deliver the best user and advertiser experiences at scale.”

Until Thompson gives more deets on the earnings call, which I will be liveblogging, here’s Yahoo’s official press release and cool charts on the subject:

YHOO News 2012-4-17 General

YHOO_Q112EarningsPresentation

Now I know the answer: Zurich. As in Switzerland. Banerjee is going to be the Chief Technology Officer of the Swiss industrial-tech giant ABB.

What is ABB? I don’t know very much about it, either. But it has popped up on my radar screen in the past. In 2010, when I wrote this Bloomberg Businessweek story about the Stuxnet worm that targeted computers involved in the control of industrial equipment, I learned that several companies make programmable logic controllers and other gear that might in theory be attacked by a Stuxnet-like worm. ABB is one of them.

That’s not exactly a headline for what the company does. It’s actually pretty big. It has 134,000 employees around the world, and has been in existence for almost 130 years. It specializes in heavy power-management gear and automation equipment that is used in industrial settings.

ABB announced the news in a press release that hit the wires overnight, and which I have shared below:

ABB appoints Prith Banerjee to Executive Committee as Chief Technology Officer

Banerjee to join ABB from Hewlett Packard, to start new role midyear 2012

Zurich, Switzerland, April 5, 2012 – ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has appointed Prith Banerjee to its Executive Committee in the role of Chief Technology Officer. Banerjee, 51, will start midyear 2012 and will be based in Zurich.

He joins ABB from Hewlett Packard, where he was Senior Vice President of Research and Director of HP Labs. Prior to that, Banerjee was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Banerjee has also held senior positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Northwestern University. In 2000, he founded AccelChip, Inc., a developer of products and services for electronic design automation that was acquired by Xilinx in 2006. He succeeds Peter Terwiesch, who became head of ABB in Germany and manager of ABB’s Central Europe region in July 2011.

“Prith is a creative and entrepreneurial researcher and executive with a wealth of experience in the business and academic worlds,” said Joe Hogan, ABB’s chief executive officer. “He is well placed to help ABB build on its heritage of technology innovation and leadership.”

Banerjee has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people.

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo’s massive round of layoffs — which is likely to impact up to 2,000 employees — is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that will hit the storied Silicon Valley Internet giant in the months to come.

Sources said Yahoo is currently planning to announce the cuts in staff in the early morning, just as the markets open. That could change, of course, but the cuts will definitely occur within the next two days.

The layoffs, which will touch all units of the company, are expected to hit hardest in the product division, which is headed by Blake Irving.

But the fate of two key parts of the soon-to-be-blown-apart unit — Yahoo’s advertising technology businesses, Right Media and APT, and its search business — is still being contemplated, as I have previously reported. Possible scenarios include a sale or a joint venture transaction for both, which employ thousands of Yahoo staffers.

Also set to be hard hit are Yahoo’s local businesses, as well as its marketing and research divisions. While still sustaining losses, its media units will not be as badly impacted. And it’s not clear how many employee terminations will be aimed at the company’s general and administrative staff.

The layoffs tomorrow are not the end of the road in cutting costs. Along with the likely shedding of its ad tech and search businesses, Yahoo leadership is also looking at future cuts as it evaluates current businesses, which could lop even more employees off its roster.

That said, Yahoo will be “doubling down” in some older and new arenas, so there would also be simultaneous hiring in the months ahead.

But not tomorrow, which will be one of the tougher days in Yahoo’s long history of periodic layoffs. Newly installed CEO Scott Thompson had told employees in memos and also in recent meetings that “real change” was coming to the company.

That is indeed the case, which is causing massive strain throughout the company, which now employs over 14,000 and has many thousands more hired as contractors.

Along with the trauma of the layoffs, Yahoo is also facing two other tense face-offs externally. In one, activist shareholder Third Point is waging a proxy fight for board seats and stepped up the public pressure this week; and Facebook struck back hard at Yahoo’s patent lawsuit with a counter-claim of its own.

After the layoffs tomorrow, sources say Yahoo will be announcing a new organization by next week, which will create several major, soup-to-nuts units at the company. Thompson, along with consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, are making what appear to be profound changes.

Sources said Yahoo will most likely be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s consumer products businesses and one focused on global and regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 employees aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is pegged to run the media arm, which will also include its leads/commerce businesses, such as autos; Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — is likely to run consumer products, which will include Yahoo’s communications and search businesses.

Yahoo has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, who will also be boss of the U.S., Asia and Europe, Middle East and Africa sales regions. Rich Riley, who was recently running EMEA, is reportedly the pick for U.S. sales; Rose Tsou, who is running Asia, would presumably stay put; Yahoo is looking for an EMEA sales lead.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

One big question mark is how Chief Product Officer Irving fits in the possible new org, in which the new units get control of their product development. Irving has reportedly had several incoming job offers, although it is not clear if he has responded to that interest.

Let’s hope that Yahoos who will be let go tomorrow find themselves with many new employment choices after the ax falls.

Yahoo is preparing to begin layoffs of what could be thousands of employees starting next week, according to multiple sources, and is then expected to announce a new restructuring of the company the week after.

The swirl at the Silicon Valley Internet giant has grown more intense this week, as new CEO Scott Thompson has brought in top management for a series of meetings both Tuesday and Wednesday to outline the plans.

What has emerged — although sources noted that Thompson and others communicating the pending changes said nothing was yet set in stone — is the picture of a drastically slimmed-down organization with a focus on media, advertising and new but unclear “future” initiatives.

First the layoffs: Sources said the cuts will be deep and mostly aimed at the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo, which are likely to take place Wednesday. The ultimate goal, said multiple sources, is to cut many thousands from Yahoo’s staff of close to 14,000 employees, which is actually much larger, due to contract workers not officially in its roster.

The entire cut will not take place at once, said sources, since Thompson and others are still trying to figure out how to dispense with its ad technology org and, potentially, its search business. He has been in discussions with both Microsoft and Google about this, although there are other possibilities, too.

Both these parts of Yahoo together have about 2,500 staffers, whose fate is not yet sorted out.

Also still baking is the new structure, although sources said it is most likely to be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s communications and search businesses, and ones focused on global and also regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is the likeliest exec to run the media arm, while Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — would be the obvious candidate for the the communications/search one.

Thompson has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, although one possible internal exec for the job could be Rich Riley, who was recently running Yahoo’s Europe, Africa and Middle East region.

It is not clear how Chief Product Officer Blake Irving fits in the possible new org, since much of the development could now move to the decentralized units.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

Thompson, along with consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, presented the possible plan in front of Yahoo’s senior execs on Tuesday. That was followed by more meetings with a wider range of top management yesterday, although Thompson was not as highly specific in these meetings.

In fact, according to a half-dozen sources, Thompson apparently grew somewhat testy in one of the gatherings, when asked if there was a strategy he was going to announce in more detail to the group.

(Dear Scott, these are very talented employees who love the company and who have been through the wringer and it’s not their fault that leadership has failed them, so it might be a good idea to treat them with as much respect as possible right now.)

More to come, obviously.

The company began taking preorders for the device in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain today, with a promised ship date of April 27. Notably, Amazon is not offering a cheaper advertising-supported version of the Kindle Touch in Europe, and the one it is offering will not support the Kindle lending library.

And what of the Kindle Fire? Is there a European ETA for that? Said an Amazon spokesperson, “We have nothing to announce at this time.”

Targeted in the query are the so-called E5 — Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Vodafone — whose CEOs met occasionally, beginning in 2010, ostensibly to discuss major industry issues.

Topics of discussion reportedly ran the gamut of innocent topics — from mobile payment platforms to the creation of a common app platform. But evidently the EC is concerned that more nefarious things may have been discussed, and if that was the case, whether the meetings constituted collusion.

The European Commission confirmed the inquiry, but stressed that at this stage no formal investigation has been launched.

“The requests for information relate to the manner in which standardization for future services in the mobile-communications area is taking place,” a spokesman for EC Competition Chief Joaquin Almunia explained. “These fact-finding steps do not mean that we have competition concerns at this stage, nor do they prejudge the follow-up.”

So this may not necessarily lead to an official investigation. That said, such requests do often signal that a more detailed probe is in the offing.

Earlier this week, Rich Riley — the nattily dressed SVP and managing director of Yahoo’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region — sent an email to his staff that he was stepping down from that top role at the company.

But, unlike other high-ranking execs who have departed the Silicon Valley Internet company of late, Riley wrote: “I sincerely hope to remain with Yahoo! once the transition is complete and am working with [CEO Scott Thompson] and team to find my next big challenge.”

Leave it to Rich to be novel! (My sincere hope is that he’ll be bringing those slim-cut Zegna blazers to Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ.)

Here’s the entire Riley goodbye-to-Europe email below:

Hey Team,

I wanted to quickly update you on my personal plans. After an amazing 4+ years in London and Geneva, my wife and I have decided that it’s time to bring our European adventure to a close and move on to our next phase back in the US. We plan to move by the end of the summer in time for the kids to start the school year. As a family, we can’t believe we are going to leave such an amazing place, but those timeless forces of being close to family have led us to the conclusion that it’s time for us to move back. Professionally, I will find it so hard to say goodbye to this amazing team and this impressive business that we’ve built together.

Over the past four years we’ve fundamentally turned around this region. We figured out how to grow revenue and be a leading seller of display advertising and are now taking share in nearly every market in which we operate. We figured out that we had to get onto global product platforms to compete and that transition is nearly complete and our audience metrics are at all-time highs and growing rapidly. We figured out that there were huge opportunities in expansion markets and the Middle East and have executed against them. But most impressively to me by far is the team that we have assembled. A team that from country to country is seen as among the strongest in the market and has the highest morale of any team at Yahoo! I am very proud of this team and will miss you most of all.

The reason for communicating this now is that we need to start the search for my successor. We will search internally and externally with a clear mandate to find an amazing leader that can take our great business to the next level and grow revenues to $1 billion and beyond … The future for the EMEA Region is going to be fantastic.

As for me, I sincerely hope to remain with Yahoo! once the transition is complete and am working with Scott and team to find my next big challenge.

Until then, I’m 100% focused as always and we’ll have plenty of chances to say goodbye. It has been a true honor to work with all of you.

Best,

Rich

Yahoo’s massive product unit is readying a major reorganization, which will include a new structure, a move that is being spearheaded by its Chief Product Officer, Blake Irving.

But the ground under Irving, as well as several of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s top execs, is about to get shakier too, due to a wide range of changes now being plotted by newly installed CEO Scott Thompson.

While still in the early stages of formulation, sources said Thompson has been mulling bringing in a head of global advertising sales or revenue chief, as well as more top product execs, as he moves to initiate a plan to shake up Yahoo and also put his own stamp on the company.

Layoffs and possible wholesale abandonment of certain businesses Yahoo is currently in are likely to be parts of this larger plan.

Confused yet? So am I, but let’s sort through all the latest activity.

First, there’s the Yahoo product redo, which has been in the making for a while, well before Thompson arrived last month.

Under the new plan, which is described as “an evolution rather than blowing up the place,” Yahoo’s famously matrixed product unit could be split into three distinct areas: Monetization, which is expected to be headed by longtime exec Mark Morrissey; platform, with cloud dude Jay Rossiter in charge; and consumer-facing products, possibly in the hands of search kingpin Shashi Seth.

The idea behind the latest setup, presumably, is to spur innovation and make it easier for Yahoo to spit out products more quickly. Its recent Livestand tablet app, for example, was late to the game and continues to struggle to gain any real ground, said sources.

Overall, Yahoo still continues to lag behind other Internet rivals in a number of product arenas, for reasons that Thompson is delving into.

The way products are made got a long look-see this past week, in a day-long meeting that Thompson had with Yahoo’s top team execs. Thompson reportedly quizzed the group on its plans, and pressed it to look less at short-term features and maintenance than on finding the next great thing.

“I think it’s fair to say that Scott is wondering why Yahoo did not come up with innovations like Pinterest and Instagram,” said one person about hot new start-ups that are in the sweet spot of Yahoo’s business. “Or, at the very least, why it did not even try to buy them.”

That’s why Thompson, with the help of board members, including David Kenny, has been on the hunt for new talent for Yahoo. That includes a search that is on for a new head of marketing, too.

Thompson has been doing the same kind of assessment with Yahoo’s media and advertising execs, who include Americas head Ross Levinsohn, as well as Asia’s Rose Tsou, and Rich Riley, who heads its efforts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Sources said he believes that Yahoo might need a head of global sales or a chief of revenue to better organize and align its key advertising business. Ad revenues now make up a bulk of Yahoo’s business.

As Thompson has said numerous times publicly since he came on board, he is seeking to diversify that revenue, focusing on new businesses and also goosing non-ad ones already performing well. In Asia, for example, Yahoo has a robust online commerce business in comparison to other regions.

“Yahoo has to slim down and focus in some ways and bulk up in others,” said another source.

Of course, all of this might be moot, depending on how activist shareholder Daniel Loeb, who is prepping his own frontal attack on making changes at Yahoo, decides to move. According to sources, Loeb is assembling his own slate and trying to garner support from other shareholders, in hopes of further improving the value of his more than five percent stake.

What form that will take is unclear, but it’s not completely friendly at the moment.

In addition, Yahoo execs and its board are trying to wrap up a deal to sell off parts of its Asian assets in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, part of a massive arrangement that could bring many billions of dollars of assets and cash into the core company that is left.

Which could then make Yahoo more able to compete, and give Thompson a war chest to do so — or make it an even tastier treat for a wide range of outside investors looking for a deal.

Like I said: Confused yet?

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.

In a speech given at the Concurrences conference in Paris today, Almunia promised to take a hard line with the abuse of technology standards-related patents.

“When monopolies and tight oligopolies are allowed to occupy a market, they tend to resist change and often end up caring only about the preservation of their business models,” Almunia said. “Owners of such standards essential patents are conferred a power on the market that they cannot be allowed to misuse.”

And should they try, there will be hell to pay, because Almunia is fully prepared to use the EU’s antitrust powers to thwart them.

“I am determined to use antitrust enforcement to prevent the misuse of patent rights to the detriment of a vigorous and accessible market,” he said. “I have initiated investigations on this issue in several sectors and we will see the results in due time.”

Among those inquiries? A formal investigation into Samsung to determine whether it’s using standards-essential patents to manipulate the mobile market in Europe.

The New York-based company, which sells travel deals and daily deals via email and from its Web site, said fourth-quarter revenues totaled $35.2 million, falling below analyst expectations of $38.7 million.

However, Travelzoo did manage to return a healthy profit of 40 cents a share, exceeding estimates of 35 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, which conducted a survey of analysts.

The company is Groupon’s closest publicly held competitor, other than Google or Amazon, which don’t break out results from daily deals. Groupon was also trading lower today, falling about 3 percent, or 59 cents, to $19.49 a share. Groupon will report fourth-quarter earnings in two weeks on Feb. 8.

In a statement, CEO Chris Loughlin said despite a slower period for travel advertising in the fourth quarter, revenues in that period grew faster year over year than in any quarter in four years.

A majority of its revenues are still coming from travel. For instance, in 2011, Travelzoo reported that 57.8 percent of deals sold were for travel and only 26.7 percent came from local discounts. Search revenues coming from comparison shopping sites such as SuperSearch and Fly.com made up for the remainder.

Still, it is local that is growing the fastest. In North America, local deals grew 196 percent year over year.

The company ended the period with 21.5 million subscribers in North America and Europe, up 14 percent from the end of 2010.

Reuters reports that the EC will likely make that decision by March. “I will receive comments from the case team towards the end of the first quarter,” said EC antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia. “I do not expect anything sooner. Let us see.”

Let us see, indeed. There are rumblings that the EC is compiling a Statement of Objections detailing Google’s various alleged abuses of its market dominance and could drop it in CEO Larry Page’s lap sometime this spring.

Of course, Google is facing regulatory scrutiny in the United States as well. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission said it would expand its antitrust probe of the company to include its controversial “search, plus your world” feature, which introduces social content from the company’s Google+ service into users’ search results.

Global sales of semiconductors were $25.1 billion in November, representing a decrease of 2.4 percent from October. On a year-to-date basis, global chip sales were up by 0.8 percent versus the same time in 2010.

Last month, Intel slashed its sales outlook by $1 billion on concerns that effects of floods in Thailand would impact demand for PCs, and thus for its microprocessors. The flooding has caused what’s being described as the most significant supply chain disruption to the PC and server industry in a generation.

SIA President Brian Toohey described the disruption as a near-term problem. “Supply chain disruptions resulting from the floods in Thailand have impacted semiconductor sales in the near term, however OEMs” — PC and other electronics manufacturers — “are expected to recover production losses over the course of the next few months,” he said in a statement.

“November sales were additionally affected by the continuing European financial crisis which is having a broad impact on other economies and global demand,” he said. The impact from Europe is especially clear in the 11.5 percent drop in sales to that region, which you can see in the chart below, a screen-grab from the SIA’s press release.

(Image credit: iStockphoto | V777999)

The disruption, which occurred at about 6 am ET, was still affecting users nearly three hours later, with no time given for a resolution.

“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” Research In Motion said in a statement. “We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused while this is resolved.”

Another tough break for RIM, which endured a service disruption in Canada last month, and at least two fairly major outages in the U.K. and U.S. last year.

According to sources, AOL’s head of Europe Kate Burns has left the company and has been replaced by Goviral chairman and co-founder Jimmy Maymann.

Goviral is a unit of AOL’s Advertising.com and has been a bright spot in its ad business. Goviral’s CEO René Rechtman will now serve as the new head of the European Advertising.com Group.

Burns, who is SVP of sales and operations for AOL Europe, does not seem to have immediate plans and will stay at the company until the end of October.

Maymann reports to Ned Brody, who was recently named AOL’s sales head and Chief Revenue Officer.

According to an internal memo, he will head the Huffington Post owned-and-operated businesses for both Europe and Latin America. The Huffington Post unit has taken over all of AOL’s content businesses.

In related news, Peter Kafka reported earlier today that AOL’s music head had left the New York-based company for a start-up.

The change in Europe happened last week, the second international shift at a big U.S. Internet concern. Yesterday, I reported that Yahoo’s Latin America head left the company.

In fact, here is the memo from Brody, if you want go to town:

From: “Brody, Ned”
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:40:03 -0400
To: AOL_Advertising, B2B, FriendsofAdvertising, B2B_Partners
Cc: AOLExecTeam
Subject: Organizational Update

Team,

As you know, one of our focus areas has been to re-emerge as a dynamic player outside of North America. As a part of this plan, we made the strategic decision two weeks ago to focus these sales and marketing efforts on our core global businesses: the Advertising.com Group and The Huffington Post. I’m excited about the plans we have to move these businesses forward.

To best support these changes, we’ve formalized an operational structure that we believe will set us on the path for even greater global growth. I’m excited to announce that René Rechtman will serve as the new head of the European Advertising.com Group business and Jimmy Maymann will lead the Huffington Post O&O business for Europe and Latin America. René and Jimmy will report directly to me.

René will lead our strategy of partnering with publishers and advertisers across Europe. We believe that his proven leadership and expanded focus on our publisher and advertising businesses will allow us to scale quickly. Advertising.com and goviral operate in over 10 countries in Europe and we have an opportunity to fulfill our mission of building the strength of quality publishers and the strength of Europe’s best brands.

To help meet the outpouring of demand in many countries for our brand and content, we will be moving our global content platforms back into Europe — having started with the UK — and opening opportunities in Latin America. Jimmy will lead our European and Latin America operations, pushing our content expansion opportunities. He is one of the most talented entrepreneurs in our organization and the right person to lead this forward.

Our strong leadership team will continue to support the execution of our strategy. Nimeshh Patel will continue his role as head of European operations and will report directly into Artie Minson. Sarah Gavin will continue to lead marketing and communications, reporting into Maureen Sullivan. Noel Penzer will now serve as VP, Europe and Latin America, reporting into Jimmy. Luke Aviet will take on a wider European remit in the Advertising.com group, focusing on internationalization and expansion, and will continue to report into René.

It’s important to note that our current progress could not have been achieved without tremendous leadership. At this point in our company’s development, Kate Burns has made a personal decision to leave AOL to spend more time with her family and personal pursuits. Two years ago, Kate came on board as the SVP of European Sales and CEO of the European operation to help turn the business around. In that short time, she has successfully refocused our efforts, established a strong leadership team and scaled the new business operational structure.

She and the team have done this well ahead of schedule and I’m particularly proud of this progress. Kate will remain on board until the end of October in an advisory capacity and to help with the transition. Please join me in wishing Kate well in her future endeavors.

We told the world AOL would return to the global stage and that’s exactly what we did and what we’re doing. We have a number of exciting launches in the works in the coming months as well as executing on our daily commitment to our consumers, advertisers and teams. I ask that you continue to stay focused on our goals and most important, celebrate the amazing accomplishments of our collective teams in advancing our global strategy.

Best,

Ned

In the first quarter of 2009, RIM shipped 54 percent of the smartphones sold in North America. Now, just a few years later, it’s shipping less than a quarter of that — an estimated 13 percent in the second calendar quarter of 2011.

That does not bode well for the BlackBerry maker, says Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu, who views the company’s “progressive effacement” from the North American handset market as a foreshadowing of things to come abroad.

“We see the beginning of a weakness in the U.K. market, and BlackBerry might soon be in decline in other European countries as well,” Ferragu writes in a research note today, adding that his discussions with European operators suggest the BlackBerry is no longer considered a preferred mid-range smartphone.

Ugly news for RIM, because the BlackBerry isn’t exactly killing it at the high end, either. As Ferragu notes, “RIM has been completely routed in high-end smartphones.” The 18 percent share of that market segment it held in the first calendar quarter of 2010 slipped to just 8 percent in the first quarter of 2011.

And at this point, RIM can ill afford to lose on one front, let alone two. Yet that appears to be what’s happening as rivals like Apple, Samsung and HTC extend the reach of their handset portfolios to lower price points.

“We believe that the sub-$300 smartphone market will soon display an evolution similar to that of the high-end market as Apple, Samsung and HTC, which have formed an oligopoly in the high end, expand into the mid- and low end,” Ferragu concludes. “RIM’s market share has already declined 3 points from the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011. We expect RIM to lose a further 5 points of market share by 2012 as the oligopolistic players extend their domain.”

RIM reports results for its second quarter Thursday afternoon after the bell.

And now for our media bummer of the week: Even without a 2008-style meltdown, ad spending is already contracting.

Kantar Media says that U.S. ad spending grew 2.8 percent in Q2. That’s still growth, but it’s the smallest quarterly gain since the media business began crawling out of its post-Lehman hole.

In fact, it turns out that ad spending has been slowing since the second half of last year. Ad buys grew by 8.7 percent in Q3 2010, but have been shrinking since then.

Some sales guys I’ve talked with are still shrugging off the decline as the result of more difficult comps: It was a lot easier to post big year-over-year increases when the preceding year was the apocalypse.

And again, if you’re in digital ad sales and you don’t work for Yahoo or AOL, you’re probably not seeing any sign of a slowdown at all. And if you sell newspaper ads, you’re used to bad news because you haven’t really had good news in years.

But if things really do crater worldwide — and today doesn’t look like much fun at all — then all bets are off, no matter what you’re selling.

Google TV’s failure to take off in the States evidently hasn’t dissuaded the company from pushing it into new markets — or attempting to, anyway.

The search behemoth’s struggling Internet television service is headed for Europe.

In a keynote speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Europe’s leading broadcasting industry conference, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said Google TV will launch in Europe early in 2012.

“Just as smartphones sparked a whole new era of innovation for the Internet, we hope Google TV can help do the same for television, creating more value for all,” Schmidt said. “We expect Google TV to launch in Europe early next year, and of course the U.K. will be among the top priorities.”

And it will likely be slow going when it does launch, if the service’s ramp-up in the U.S. is anything to go by. Disappointing sales and lackluster reviews have hamstrung Google TV’s adoption in the States. Still, the company is committed to changing that, with a new version of the service and additional hardware partners. Said Schmidt, “We’re absolutely committed to staying, to improving Google TV.”