Technology Industry Archive

Salesforce.com is more than simply the market leader for software-as-a-service (SaaS). While others (notably NetSuite) came to market sooner, Salesforce.com was the first company to successfully sell the idea of hosting software in its own data centers and delivering it as a service via the Internet on any kind of scale. It did this by becoming the most vocal proponent of SaaS, and in so doing...

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CNET got a hold of the Yahoo reorganization memo that CEO Carol Bartz issued yesterday. But by focusing on organizational issues, is she overlooking some of the even more fundamental issues that the company must face? First, here are the fundamental points she made in the memo: Yahoo’s goal is deliver “consumer and advertiser experiences.” Structural changes, with an emphasis...

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CoreBrand, which has been measuring corporate brand and financial performance for years, pulled together for us the top ten technology brands. Whether measured as perception of brand strength or as the contribution that brand makes to market cap, you may find some of the results surprising. The first list is a measure of what CoreBrand calls brand power. There are a few caveats. The list does...

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Steve Ballmer just can’t quit bashing Yahoo co-founder and ex-CEO Jerry Yang. During Microsoft’s annual mid-year analyst meeting held this morning, the Microsoft CEO quipped, “I don’t want to be known as the Jerry Yang of this episode.” The episode in question is Microsoft throwing good money after bad in a seemingly quixotic quest to gain on Google in the search...

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Cisco, EMC and Dell have done such a good job of filling data centers with their servers and storage devices that in order to keep growing in new markets, they’ve either got to disrupt their own installed bases or expand into adjacent ones. For the time being at least, these dinosaurs have chosen the latter option, pushing a new vision of the data center they’re calling...

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EMC is used to having the enterprise storage space by the throat, but knows it has a lot of work to do before becoming a household name among consumers, to whom it would like to begin selling a range of storage devices and services. That may explain why it seems to be trying to intimidate the competition by boasting about its storage-software expertise and dangling news of a significant...

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Autodesk has mostly been in the news as the former employer of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. But the company has had other news: financial problems attributed to the current economic malaise. Last month, the company lowered its fourth quarter forecast and announced that it would cut ten percent of its workforce. And now word is that the company is subletting at least 80,000 square feet at two of its...

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Dennis Crouch, an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law and one of the most popular bloggers on patent law, has done another of his interesting analyses. This time the subject is the practical life span of patents – and the bottom line is that it is shorter than what the law allows. The grant of a patent is theoretically for 20 years but, practically speaking, it is...

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Intel sues Nvidia — Intel is suing Nvidia over whether the graphic chip company can build and sell chipsets for Nehalem processors. Apparently the two companies have been going back and forth over this point for the last year. You’d think that a company dealing with antitrust charges in Europe might want to tread carefully. But then, losing the Apple notebook chipset business to...

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According to a report from ThinkEquity Parterns, Apple is snapping up such quantities of RAM chips, in preparation for the next generation iPhone, that there will be a shortage. But not all analysts agree, and there are some things about the story that sound … well, difficult to believe. I emailed memory market expert Jim Handy of Objective Analysis and asked him what he knew about the story...

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