Last week, BloggingStocks writer Eric Buscemi brought us the news that Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) intends to spend $1 billion to expand chip assembly and test operations in the Philippines. Analysts are almost unanimously positive on TI performance and now there's one more bit of positive news. SDA Asia Magazine has reported that Larry Tan has been named President of TI's operations in Asia. In light of Tan's 28 year history with TI, from manufacturing on through marketing, Tan is a perfect fit with the new depth of focus that TI has undertaken in its manufacturing flow.

Earlier this year, Texas Instruments adopted a new manufacturing strategy which more closely aligns the expressed needs of their customers with the R&D of TI's third party suppliers. This gives TI a deeper layer of product development and manufacturing control. This strategic shift should give greater quality assurance capabilities to TI and should also speed the processes of product design and development. Texas Instruments now looks at the R&D efforts of its supplier foundries as the first step in its own manufacturing process.

Texas Instruments forecasts that it will spend about $2.3 billion on research and development in 2007. Areas of primary focus shall include: reduced power consumption, reduced costs for digital mobile hardware, reduced size for SRAM memory requirements and analog chip technology. By working more closely with the R&D departments of its third party suppliers to accomplish projects already in process, Texas Instruments will have greater availability of its own resources to apply to new and upcoming technological developments.

Aha! We were wondering how Microsoft came up with the name "Zune," and now maybe we know? Could they have been buzzed on that beer in the fridge in Kirkland? That's where the Mobile and Imbedded Devices Experience (MEDX) design center is located, and where, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, engineers "have fun" by playing shoot-em-up with Nerf guns in their open offices, and yep, drink beer.

The employees in MEDX are ultra-mobile; none have land lines (using their cell phones, instead), everything rolls on the concrete floors, and even the monitors swivel. The beer, supposedly, is saved for Friday afternoons, when the teams play Xbox and ...

Xbox and beer? No wonder those operating expenses are so high.

In other "Microsoft is oh-so-wrong" news today, ValleyWag is reporting that a she-devil is advertising for Microsoft's VisualSourceSafe software! Yes, it's really just a badly-positioned repeating background, but boy, is that image eery.

After listening to a talk by the brilliant and peppy Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr and now-Yahoo! employee, on Friday, I was intrigued to see an interview with Yahoo!'s VP for product strategy (the guy who makes the deals), Bradley Horowitz, about what the entrepreneurial tech firm is looking to buy next [WSJ subscription required].

He mentioned that his team looks at hundreds of pitches each week, while he ends up seeing only "dozens" of them and still so many of the products have the same pitch: "it's the next Flickr!" they all say. He's surprised at the number of "Computer Science 101 projects" that come across his desk -- i.e., companies that are both obvious and simplistic.

He's looking for people ("in it for the right reason" and "passionate about their product") more than he is product, but he's unclear as to what sort of product he might invest in. When you think about it, Yahoo! already had photo sharing before it bought Flickr. The next big thing for Yahoo!? Just might be more of the same, but with really cool folks attached to it. After all, haven't all the really great ideas already been invented?

Sarah Gilbert has a Wharton MBA and worked in investment banking for several years, then at a series of increasingly edgy startups before finding her calling, producing blogs for AOL. She doesn't own stock in Yahoo!.

Photo courtesy Horowitz' colleague Stewart Butterfield.

As our site certainly reflects, everything new Google product launch seems to be associated with its ability to "kill" the competition. Putting a "G" in front of anything seems to strike fear in the hearts of investors in competitors, from eBay to Microsoft to AOL. But does Google actually succeed in slaying the knights of Yahoo! with its quiver of wildly-aimed product arrows? An analysis by BusinessWeek suggests, not so much.

Google Talk, for instance, was widely acclaimed as a fearsome challenger to MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger. But today, a little less than a year after its launch, the messaging program ranks #10 according to comScore Media Metrix. Social networking site Orkut, hugely popular at launch, is now at less than 1% share in that space (and much though I drooled for an invite, I visited the site once in the past year, although I've frequented many other social networking spots). Google Finance, Google Spreadsheets, and Google blog search have definitely not yet made their home in the "win" column.

The Google new product development process is described by Marissa Mayer as "try a bunch of ideas, refine them, and see what survives." And those that "survive" don't just live, but thrive; Google Maps is now #2 only to Mapquest, and Google News is (in my opinion) the best news search tool available, anywhere.

The big question BusinessWeek asks (and one that no one else is asking right now): does Google even know how to develop a product? The magazine says many of its new services lack "stickiness" and aren't really those that "people want to use." For a company whose product announcements are widely feared and its investors, them's fighting words. Will Google prove to be a conquistador or a schoolyard bully, great at making threats, but quivering inside for fear some competitor might actually stand its ground?

I'm up late watching Charlie Rose's taped interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In raving about Google's 20% rule -- that engineers can spend 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing -- Schmidt says that all of their new products come from that 20% "free time." Charlie asks an obvious question, one that's been bugging me for months: "why not make it 50%?"

Schmidt doesn't answer the question, really (he is a CEO after all), basically saying that, although it's a great idea, and they should do it, anarchy would prevail.

Why would anarchy prevail if 50% of a creative worker's time was spent doing creative, independently-chosen work? I think it's a fantastic idea and one that many companies should employ. If workers are selected for their extreme intelligence and ability to innovate, why not have them create the products they wish existed? We'd all be better for it.