A rocky week for tech stocks and the rest of Wall Street closed Friday with the official end to Bill Gates' full-time tenure at Microsoft Corp.
Gates, who dropped out of college to launch Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, is going part-time as chairman to spend more time on his charitable foundation. He leaves Microsoft at a time when the company is struggling to beat Google Inc. in the online advertising market, after Yahoo Inc.'s snub of its $47.5 billion buyout bid, and following the lackluster launch of its latest operating system, Windows Vista.
In less historic personnel news, Google Inc. named Patrick Pichette as its new chief financial officer Wednesday to replace George Reyes, who retired in December.
A few high-profile earnings reports trickled in this week, from business software maker Oracle Corp. and others. Oracle posted a strong fiscal third quarter Wednesday, but its tepid forecast disappointed investors and its shares closed down about 3.7 percent for the week. Still, many analysts were positive.
"As we enter the seasonally slower summer months, we would use any pockets of share weakness to continue to accumulate shares," wrote Israel Hernandez of Lehman Brothers.
Also during the week, BlackBerry smart phone maker Research In Motion Ltd. and rival and Treo maker Palm Inc. reported their quarterly results.
On Wednesday, RIM said its fiscal first-quarter profit more than doubled due to strong BlackBerry sales, but the earnings and the company's second-quarter earnings outlook fell a bit short of analyst estimates at the time, as polled by Thomson Financial.
On Thursday, Palm reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that missed analysts' views and the company indicated losses will continue in the first quarter.
Palm said sales of its low-price, low-margin Centro smart phone are strong, but are being offset by slowing sales of higher-margin Treo devices.
Shares of both companies finished the week lower, with RIM down more than 16 percent and Palm down more than 10 percent for the week.
Sprint Nextel Corp.'s shares were an unusual bright spot this week even as Wall Street tumbled. The nation's third largest wireless carrier said Thursday its recently launched Samsung Instinct touch-screen smart phone _ the company's answer to the iPhone _ is selling at a record pace. Sprint's shares closed the week up nearly 13 percent.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Virgin Mobile USA Inc. said Friday that it is buying struggling cell phone carrier Helio LLC for $39 million in stock.
Helio was launched in 2006 as a joint venture of EarthLink Inc. and SK Telecom. It has 170,000 subscribers, down from almost 200,000 at the start of the year.
Additionally, British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group and SK Telecom will both invest $25 million in Virgin Mobile. This will give SK Telecom a 17 percent stake in Virgin Mobile.
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Compiled by Rachel Metz and Barbara Ortutay, AP Business Writers in New York.
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