Technology Analysis

Yesterday Google showed off its forthcoming Chrome OS, leaving many to wonder how exactly the company will monetize it. The answer: it won’t. Since Google derives 97% of its revenue from online ads, it simply wants you using a computer that is always online. Specifically, it wants you on a computer that is one click away from YouTube, which has been flourishing this quarter into a bona...

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Following the European Union’s review of the proposed Oracle-Sun deal, and Oracle’s response, makes you wonder whether continental regulators and Larry Ellison have an unquenchable taste for irony or are really interested in seeing Sun dead and buried, given that the review time has just extended another six days to January 27. Sun had been shopping itself around for a long time,...

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So Sony (SNE) has a great new: use a that new online service connecting gadgets to movies to help build brand loyalty. Too bad management is so completely out of touch with reality: Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the service, set for launch next year, highlights an advantage that Sony has over rivals like Samsung Electronics Co. and other manufacturers that don’t produce their...

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Google provided some details about its upcoming Chrome OS. Although the information was interesting, the session raised some questions about the operating system: Will regulators give Google a pass? Other browsers don’t run on Chrome, though people are free to take the source code and modify it to run around another browser. However, given the way governments in general, and the European...

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The auto industry has been facing it for years. And now it seems that the eye of California environmental regulators, in the form of the California Energy Commission, is settling on consumer electronics, with proposed standards on television energy consumption, according to AOL Daily Finance. That could mean de facto standards for the rest of the country, given the dynamics of electronics...

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Over on ZDNet’s Between the Lines, Larry Dignan makes the argument that we need a “beautiful mess” in operating systems, with many choices to run on a machine. As much as I respect Larry, I think he’s completely off-base. Some competition? Absolutely. A mess? Ultimately costly, unproductive, and of interest only to a select few, not the wide number of people who depend...

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Top management changes in the two major U.S. satellite television companies reflect an industry need for new thinking to match a changing media landscape. DirecTV (DTV) has named former PepsiCo (PEP) exec Michael White as CEO, while Charles Ergen is leaving as EchoStar (SATS) CEO, though remaining as chairman. There is some degree of recycling going on. White replaces Larry Hunter, who has been...

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Sometimes you can try too hard in marketing and shoot yourself in the foot, the way AT&T has largely done, all in reaction to what a competitor says. I came across another classic example of this today in an email sent by the PR firm for SugarCRM, a competitor to Salesforce.com. You’ve heard of Salesforce, right? Software as a Service (though they like calling themselves a cloud...

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ITT Educational Services reported that new student enrollment increased 27.2 percent to 27,738 in its third quarter. With private sector lending still in decline, the for-profit educator is increasingly funding growth through an internal loan program. Despite more lending to sub-prime enrollees, few industry watchers seem concerned that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Growth metrics looked...

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There’s been some noise about deceptive online sales tactics lately, and the latest has come in a report from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that aims at Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty, accusing them of using “highly aggressive sales tactics to charge millions of American consumers for services the consumers do not want and do not understand they...

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