resignations
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Anand Chandrasekher resigns from Intel after 24 years, leaves scandal mongers hanging
Well, as tech industry resignations go, this one's not exactly sensational, but Anand Chandrasekher's plan to leave Intel is no doubt a popular topic of conversation with chip makers this week. The chief of the company's Ultra Mobility Group (UMG) and the man behind Atom, apparently resigned "to pursue other interests." Intel Architecture Group's Mike Bell and Dave Whalen will co-manage UMG in Chandrasekher's stead -- and that's about it for sordid details. His resignation isn't apt to be marked by a Mark Hurd-style scandal, and we have a feeling this is a pretty straight forward changing of the guards, but, then again, we said the same thing when Dirk Meyer left AMD.
RIM's chief marketing officer resigns
We won't read too much into this, but it comes at an interesting time -- with only a month left before RIM is expected to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, the company's chief marketing officer has resigned. The Wall Street Journal reports that RIM CMO Keith Pardy (formerly with Nokia) will leave due to "personal reasons" after a six-month transition period is up. The publication's anonymous sources add that Pardy actually made the decision a month ago, and that the move "reflects larger turmoil" within RIM -- as opposed to any sort of knee-jerk reaction over the iPad 2 launch, we suppose. To be frank, we're a little worried about the fate of the PlayBook if it's indeed close to launch -- when we tried a prototype at the Game Developer's Conference this past week in San Francisco, the hardware was still pretty solid, but the software was a bit sparse, and what was there felt like it needed more than a few coats of polish. [Thanks, Jonathan W.]
HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn resigns, effective immediately
We've just received word that HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn has resigned, effective immediately, in the wake of the corporate spying scandal that has plagued the company for weeks -- keep in mind that this is the same woman who previously said she would not step down until 2007. Earlier this month, it was revealed that while undergoing a leak investigation, HP had hired private investigators who accessed private phone records of company boardmembers and nine journalists without their permission. The investigators are said to have used pretexting -- the sleazy (not to mention illegal) act of impersonating someone else to gain access to their confidential records -- in order to acquire this information. The now-departed chairwoman, who took over from Carly Fiorina only 18 months ago, had authorized the leak investigation earlier this year to learn who among the company's board had revealed corporate information to CNET News in 2005. Dunn, other company higher-ups, and the private investigators will likely face criminal charges; Bill Lockyer, California's attorney general, said earlier this week on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" that "We currently have sufficient evidence to indict people both within Hewlett-Packard, as well as contractors on the outside." Dunn, who also recently won the Bay Area Council's Hall of Fame Leadership award (she really did), isn't quite out of the woods just yet -- she will almost certainly get completely throttled when she has to answer questions before a Congressional committee next week.
