Western Digital today announced that second fiscal quarter sales ending on December 26, 2008 will be well below its original target of between $2.025 billion to $2.150 billion, a prediction made just in October.

WD now expects revenue to be in the range of $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, with a corresponding hit down the line in operating results and net income. Like a lot of tech firms, the company is not seeing a recovery in demand for several quarters.

As such, the company is taking some rather drastic steps. It's cutting 2,500 jobs worldwide, about five percent of its headcount, reducing work hours by 20 percent, stopping the majority of its manufacturing operations from December 20 through January 1, 2009 and (Detroit, take note) reducing executive compensation.

WD will also close of one of the company's three hard drive manufacturing facilities in Thailand and one of two media substrate manufacturing facilities in Malaysia. The total reduction in capital spending for the fiscal year 2009 will be $250 million.

It's starting to feel an awful lot like 2001 again, only this time, it wasn't the tech sector that was stupid, it was the financial market. Tech just got caught in the blast radius.

If it wasn't December in San Francisco, I'd say someone at Apple's legal department needs to stay out of the sun. Apple has filed a motion to amend its complaint against the Florida clone maker that has been preloading Mac OS X on generic white box PCs to add a claim of violation of the DMCA, among several other new claims.

All things considered, Apple seems to have the momentum. Psystar's counterclaims been thrown out, a big blow to the tiny vendor. But Apple came up with a conspiracy theory, alleging that there are corporations and/or individuals behind Psystar, and it may add them as defendants once Apple finds out who they are through the discovery process.

Here's what the amended complaint says:

18. On information and belief, persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystar's unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint. The true names or capacities, whether individual, corporate, or otherwise, of these persons are unknown to Apple. Consequently they are referred to herein as John Does 1 through 10 (collectively the "John Doe Defendants"). On information and belief, the John Doe Defendants are various individuals and/or corporations who have infringed Apple's intellectual property rights, breached or induced the breach of Apple's license agreements and violated state and common law unfair competition laws. Apple will seek leave to amend this complaint to show the unknown John Doe Defendants' true names and capacities when they are ascertained.

A big thank you to Pamela Jones of Groklaw for pointing this out.

It does seem a little odd that a well-known Silicon Valley law firm would take this case, and why Psystar effectively gave Apple the finger and continued to sell its Mac OS-based clones.

This could get fun.

If this were a FARK entry, I would be breaking out the "Unlikely" tag.

Bill Veghte, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Business, told the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference that perceptions of the Windows brand had improved because of the company's $300 million ad campaign, which was based around the laughable "Project Mojave" campaign.

"In a statistically significant fashion, we moved the perception of Windows positively in September and we moved it again in October," he said, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "We have not done that outside a product release since we started the perception studies on Windows in the late 90s."

The Mojave commercials really are the wrong way to do it because they are a tacit admission that the perception of Vista is bad. Yes, we know the perception is bad, but Microsoft shouldn't be the one admitting it. When you think about it, is that really the message you want to send? Mind you, I do think Vista has gotten a bum rap, especially given that it was nVidia's poor drivers that caused many problems in the early days of its release. But that was in the winter of 2007. It is now almost two years later and both Vista and nVidia's drivers are running much better.

Then again, we heard a similar knock on the Apple ads. While effective, the ads also had the perception of making the Mac look worse, because "PC" seemed like a decent, earnest guy trying to get his job done and "Mac" was an obnoxious jerk.

Veghte didn't say much about Windows 7, just that it was "a minor release when it comes to incompatibility." And he stuck to the old January 2010 release schedule Microsoft has been stating dutifully.