Technology Industry Archive

The Inquirer ran a story about a new wave of Nvidia chip problems. Companies with semiconductor-based products might shake their heads sadly (with a smirk on competitors’ faces), but what’s happening with Nvidia should make everyone else think twice. I have to throw a big caveat in here: there is a lot of controversy over Charlie Demerjian’scoverage of Nvidia. If the story and...

More...

Dell’s stock price has taken a small hammering as its margins have slumped. So far I’ve seen this attributed to expanded marketing expenses (probably associated with its move into Asia) and to a slowing economy. But I wonder to what degree falling margins and the need for the ongoing “turnaround” are results of previous feasting too heavily at the profit trough while...

More...

There are times the US Patent & Trademark Office and large corporations can leave you scratching your head. As Om Malik reported, Microsoft has essentially received a patent on paging through a document by pressing keys on the keyboard, like page up and page down, for example. It’s absurd, but more of a problem is that the big companies undercut any credibility they had (or...

More...

Microsoft is moving ahead with version 8 of Internet Explorer, but the browser has picked up some interesting privacy features. But aside from privacy concerns, an additional consequence would be to make targeted advertising harder to achieve, which means pressure on Google, a noted Microsoft rival. The two major ones are called InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking. The former eliminates...

More...

Most companies start their existences in a general direction and then keep moving that way. But sometimes a company takes an unexpected turn, which might be hidden corporate DNA, a stroke of genius, or a mistake borne of managerial ego. Amazon’s behavior suggests a major business model change is already underway. Although Amazon is associated with online retail success, it has moved into...

More...

Although I posted the conversation with attorney Robert Clothier about some of the legal considerations of blogging, his was a view through the eyes of media law. There’s also a whole other way of looking at blogging when it comes to corporations. Labor and employment lawyer Devjani Mishra, a partner with Seyfarth Shaw LLP, was on the road ane unable to talk, but she did email some...

More...

As the Patent Troll Tracker libel suit shows, blogging can bring up some intricate legal issues. Bloggers like Dennis Crouch can find themselves facing subpoenas. A few years ago, Apple sued some bloggers that revealed the date of a new product release; the company wanted the source of the information. And as Cisco is learning, employer bloggers can entangle their employers in legal action. We...

More...

Since March, there’s been a legal brouhaha in patent circles, as lawyer Eric Albritton sued a blogger as well as the blogger’s former employer, Cisco, for libel. Now the dispute is spilling wider, as the plaintiff has sent a subpoena to a well-known law professor and blogger, Dennis Crouch, who wasn’t part of the controversy at all. What’s Albritton after? Only the...

More...

One of the potentially clear areas of change in the face of a presidential election is foreign policy. As BusinessWeek pointed out, these are unpredictable times for military deployments and for the defense contractors that provide equipment. But any impact on defense spending won’t stop there; many high tech companies could find sudden shifts in demand — and possibly drops that...

More...

Google must win the handset operating system wars because Android’s true mission is to deliver ads, just as a magazine and its articles generally exist to deliver ads. But today’s Wall Street Journal story that Verizon and Google and nearing a mobile ad deal shows the other side of the business equation: the temptation of revenue that will turn Google’s efforts into a...

More...