Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

After Ballmer, who? And what? How will having a new CEO change Microsoft?

Probably not enough, in the opinion of some company watchers, including those watching from the inside: board members.

The company needs to reinvent itself, they think, and sweeping changes are less likely to occur as long as Bill Gates continues to be chairman of the board.

Gates is in the committee that is looking for the next CEO. He is in a position to make his weight felt, even though his current ownership amounts to only about 4.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is giving more importance to hardware offerings. Some new Surface tablet models are getting positive buzz for their power and features. These models should appeal to the corporate market, where Apple has been making alarming inroads, because they appear to be true laptop replacements.

But Dell is making a push for the same market, and maybe for the mid-size and small business and consumers too, with new tablets that start several hundred dollars lower than the new Surface. The Surface feature package does look like a winner, but price-point can make or break.

In the network world, Emilio Umoeka, Juniper Networks’ “worldwide partners” senior veep (or channel chief) has announced he will leave in a few months.

Emilio Umoeka has held that key position about three years. Earlier this year Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson retired.

I would love to see Juniper continue as a strong alternative to Cisco. Maybe the company can recruit some good new execs. Personally, the return I would really like to see would be that of cartoonist Kevin Pope.

Gaertner has warned companies using BlackBerry to get busy planning to adopt a new mobile platform. For companies with an existing reliance on BlackBerry, it would be best to start planning on transition, according to analyst Ken Dulaney.

Alas, poor Blackberry, they knew it well. But its latest models and operating system revamp have not reassured corporations enough, even though some reviews have been positive.

That second quarter report from the onetime smartphone leader, showing $995 million in losses, has businesses leery. And likelihood that the company will be sold doesn’t reassure them a lot.

Adobe Systems was hacked and personal data of about 2.9 million customers was stolen. Oh, and the hackers made off with source code for some of its supplications. Think Acrobat.

The evildoers accessed customer and user names , encrypted debit and credit card numbers and “expiries” from customer orders. Think about what info you file with vendors you order from frequently, or fill in when ordering online. That is the kind of stuff that was heisted.

Adobe notified customers and reset their passwords, and also told the banks and credit card processors.

I’m still mad at Adobe for buying Aldus and scuttling its flagship programs such as PageMaker and FreeHand.

Not but what I ask publishers I work for to provide me with a spare seat of Adobe InDesign. So far the publishers have resisted my pleas; my best offer from any of them them is the equivalent of a plastic lawn chair.

The great federal shutdown has many ripple effects, and it has elements of the IT biz bobbing like corks. A number of companies doing business with the feds are beginning to wonder why they do.

For instance, there’s a $10 billion migration project that is supposed to be going forward at the Department of the Interior (DOI).

We know DOI has been affected by the shutdown. Parks and Recreation are not essential, so DOI has been busy shutting them down. Allegany National Forest? Closed for business. The critters have not been evicted, and are helping themselves to the mast crop. They are residents, but visitors are not admitted.

Unlike those hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have been sent home, Lady Liberty has been closed down but not sent home. That would be to France, right? Right now she is more of a Statue of Limitations, being limited to standing there on Ellis Island, which is off limits to the rest of us, for the duration.

DOI picked 10 companies to compete to provide elements of  the monumental cloud-computing project contract, which is the “indefinite deliver, indefinite quantity” type most fervently to be desired by IT contractors. The services and goods would be supplied over a 10-year period.

The favored vendors include Global, Aquilent, CGI, Verizon, IBM and AT&T and Unisys.

Between the shutdown and the sequestration effect, companies that have concentrated on vending to the federal government are rethinking their marketing direction.

As shaky as some former industry leaders seem, at times (BlackBerry and Aldus come to mind), the feds seem even less reliable as a contract partner. “There’s more consistency and visibility about the future (of the non-federal market),” according to Bill Gleich, president of Jeskell Systems, of Laurel, Md. “There’s more clarity in doing business with commercial entities, because of the dysfunction that is going on in the government right now.”

Unisys is going contract-by-contract, meanwhile trying to hang on to its personnel who are assigned to those federal contract projects.

The federal employees contractors are supposed to interface with are furloughed, in many cases. A few continue to work without pay. Obviously they can change their minds at any point.

Once one of the juiciest kinds of contract, deals with the feds may not be worth the endless red tape of getting them.