M&A: Now that HP has made public its intention to acquire Mercury, the real challenge is ahead — making sure that Mercury stays out of the HP deadpool. Why did HP acquire Mercury? “Because it’s absolutely crucial to HP’s Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which purports to connect IT assets to business value,” writes Eric Knorr in HP and Mercury: Here’s why. “The big question is whether HP is capable of succeeding with software at any layer higher than that of OpenView.” Users are saying that HP buying Mercury makes sense. Best of the blogs: Predictions for the year 2020. Start with the death of locality, and include next-gen speech recognition, open source components at the network edge, a proliferation of sensors, and more in this Tech Watch post. The news beat: With Bill Gates announcing plans to eventually take a less active role in Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer says he must become the primary ‘champion of innovation’ for the company. In the latest chipmaker skirmish Intel follows AMDs lead and slashes processor prices by more than half. And India may decline the $100 laptop program as it’s education secretary says that giving a laptop to every child is pedagogically suspect, and may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child. Technology Industry