Now both of the two contenders for world leadership in consumer electronics have new leaders. While Tim Cook inherited Apple's top job after the death of Steve Jobs,  Dr.  Oh-hyun Kwon [shown in photo] will step into the job as Samsung's CEO after Gee-sung Choi steps down.

But the CEO job that Kwon accepted will not be the same job Choi had. Nope. Not at all.

Chairman Kun-hee Lee, third son of the Samsung founder, oversees all at Samsung with an iron hand. He wants to separate the consumer and component segments (with consumer product division leaders, such as TV and phones, not reporting to the new CEO.)

Why? Obviously, Samsung like many Asian suppliers is a tangle of OEM and branded products. On one hand, they supply you parts and pieces...on the other hand, they bash your brand and push their own in world markets. Imagine Apple's position: as a component supplier to Apple, Samsung knows almost every move Apple will make before public, press and other competitors. Today Apple is about 5% of Samsung's total business and Samsung is Apple's Number One competitor in the marketplace...

Calling Google's Project Glass "just a  start," Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues "like mobile and tablets today, in three years, wearable computing devices will matter to every product strategist."

Wearables have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. "Imagine," asks Epps, ".. video games that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of your colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone. Wearables will transform our lives in numerous ways, trivial and substantial, that we are just starting to imagine."

Wearables will "enter the mainstream by exploiting the relative strengths of the big five platforms" (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) says Epps in her blog post.

Jennifer J. Deal’s Five Millennial Myths is subtitled: Forget what you think you know about your Gen Y employees.

That part was easy: I didn’t know much.

The conventional wisdom, apparently, is that “…everyone under the age of 30 is needy and narcissistic. They want the corner office and a company car, but they aren’t truly committed to their organization. They don’t take kindly to criticism, but can be easily won over with the next hot gadget.”

Deal asks: “Can companies afford to put their trust in these types of characterizations?”

For the past 12 years, she studied the so-called generation gap through empirical research, and found the stereotypes of millennials in the workplace asinconsistent at best and destructive at worst. With data collected from more than 13,000 participants in for-profit, nonprofit, and government organizations, Deal dentifies five key myths that companies believe about their younger employees.

Myth #1: Millennials don’t want to be told what to do.

The reality: Wrong! Their research shows (unexpectedly, she admits) that millennials currently in the workforce are more willing to defer to authority than either baby boomers or Gen Xers.

Millennials are more likely to thrive if they know the ingredients for success in the workplace, starting with the basics. For example, although it may seem obvious to an older manager, millennials may appreciate being told what time they are expected to arrive at the office, and precisely how quickly they should turn around a project (beyond just “ASAP”).

Myth #2: Millennials lack organizational loyalty. They aren’t committed to their company, and will change jobs when offered a small increase in salary.

OK, by us, Hannover in Germany is famous for CeBIT. But the success of a police stratagem in Hannover may capture attention from police forces worldwide.

In Hannover, the local polizei have a pilot scheme (Fahndung via Facebook or Manhunt via Facebook) that uses photofit technqiue delivered by social media to harness the public to locate criminal suspects.

Photofit is now generally known as Electronic Facial Identification Technique (E-FIT), as today it is a computer-based method that produces facial composites of suspects based on eyewitness descriptions. (Janina Kaminska in the UK Home Office first proposed the name "E-Fit"in 1984.)

Those familiar with the game Cluedo (Clue in No. America) know it as a popular murder/mystery-themed deduction board game...

The object of the basic game is for players to strategically move around the game board (representing a rich mansion), in the guise of one of the game's six characters (Colonel Mustard, for example) collecting clues to deduce which suspect murdered the game's victim-- and with which weapon (dagger, lead pipe, rope and a few other choices) and in what room.

In the case of the murder of the Hewlett-Packard business, we already know several clues. We know which room harbors the killers: the Board Room.

And the weapon: lack of leadership.

And the murderers?

If the Number One PC maker jumping out of the PC business didn't scare you, then maybe it was the Gartner report. The one that noted PC sales were down nearly 19% in Europe and not coming back. Or maybe you read all those news  articles about the large retailers who are showing up in the RED for their 2011 earnings calls?

Let's stop kidding ourselves: PC sales are down and we don't know when or if they are coming back. If people buy less PCs, they will buy less PC components, accessories, peripherals and etc.

So what can we do? If you are a retailer, reseller, or distributor, here are some thoughts:

"The fads for ultrabooks and tablets PCs are both short-term phenomena," said Stan Shih.

Having met and interviewed Stan Shih several times in the the past, it's easy to see why some of the journalists may misinterpret his recent quote...a quote that can be dangerous if taken out of context.

Stan Shih is not the "Acer boss" as some of these press accounts suggest. He certainly is the co-Founder of Acer (with his wife and 5 others) and still Chairman Emeritus. The Acer boss would be J.T.Wang, Chairman & CEO. If you'll remember, president and CEO Gianfranco Lanci resigned March 31, 2011 following a disagreement with the board of directors over the direction of the company.

Lanci’s resignation came after a meeting with the directors, in which the two sides could not agree on several aspects of Acer’s future, from growth to customer relations to brand management, the company said in a statement. The resignation was immediate, and J.T. Wang took over as acting CEO until a permanent replacement is found. (I am not sure they are looking hard and my guess is they will promote from within after Wang is satisfied with upcoming talent.)

When contacted at that time by the press, Stan Shih fully agreed with Wang and the directors. Lanci, one of the very few Europeans ever to run a Taiwan company at the executive level, was-- in effect-- condemned for being out-of-touch with the market and missing both the tablet and mobile bandwagons.

So for Shih now to condemn tablets and ultrabooks as a "fad" would be a shocking reversal. It's not.

In this last decade, the undisputed leader in consumer electronics has been Apple...people stood in lines just to buy Apple’s i-products, their much-coveted inventory has been sold out often, and their subcontractors regularly ran out of components trying to meet demand. Nothing has been hotter in CE than sizzling Apple, right?

So here’s a question for you. Do you think you would you have done better 10 years ago by accepting 5 euro for each iPad sold (25 million as of June 2011), each iPhone sold (100 million as of March 2011) and each iPod sold (300 million at Jan. 2011)—or by accepting 1 euro for each SD memory card shipped?

Yes, that’s right...the SD memory card...that humble, under-estimated memory card that goes inside mobile phones, media players, computers, televisions, personal navigation devices, digital cameras and many other consumer electronics gadgets.

You probably guessed right if you read the title of this article: the SD memory card is one of the consumer electronics industry’s most successful innovations with an estimated 2.5 billion SD memory cards shipped in its 10-year history.

During those 10 years as Apple polished its fame, SD memory card went quietly about its business. Life is not fair and nor is business... the SD memory card will probably never receive the public acclaim that Apple elicits. Yet inside the CE business, this unsung product hero has outsold Apple’s biggest hits by 5:1.

During the past 10 years, the SD Association has seen an estimated 8000-plus consumer electronics models manufactured by more than 400 brands worldwide rely on SD standards. More than 1000 members give the SD memory card an ecosystem that boosts the removable media market leader to nearly 80% market share today.

And it all started with a first SD memory cards that offered an impressive (at that time) 8MB of storage capacity in the size of a postage stamp.

If that one sales record of 2.5 billion sold was all to be said, SD would still go down in CE history as one of our greatest products...but-- like Apple—the SD Association has had to adopt continuous innovation to succeed.