Technology Industry Archive

Recently, Tom Krazit at CNET pointed out that Microsoft had played into Apple’s hands with the company’s latest advertising campaign. The approach effectively conceded that Macs offer a better computing experience and that all that PCs have to offer is a price advantage — at least one on initial purchase. But rather than maintain its market position, Apple has decided to fight...

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Now that YouTube has reached an agreement with several TV producers and movie studios, including Sony, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, and the BBC, to deliver their content on a premium channel, it can get started on the really big challenge: turning Web programming into a viable business. YouTube allows anyone to post videos to the Web — those of their own making, as well as copies of...

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Microsoft is trying to earn respect as a security applications vendor, a difficult proposition for a company best known among IT administrators and security experts as the company that gets around to patching vulnerabilities in its software on the second Tuesday of every month. Microsoft is making several security-related product announcements ahead of the RSA security conference opening next...

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Infosys, second only to Tata Consultancy Services among Indian outsourcing firms in terms of revenues, gave the markets a double dose of bad news yesterday, forecasting its first-ever drop in revenue for the financial year ending next March, and revealing the extent of the decline in its overall market. Infosys is the first of the large Indian outsourcing companies to report earnings, and is...

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First Skype, then StumbleUpon. What’s next — PayPal? One thing is certain: a year from now, eBay will look like a very different company. It’s unclear whether eBay will actually go through with its plan to launch an IPO for Internet telephony vendor Skype next year or simply sell it back to its owners at a better price than the pair originally offered  — negotiating...

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IBM has been flogging Web-based collaboration tools for the better part of three years, but despite its valiant attempts at Web 2.0-style hipness, comes off less like the Fonz than Mrs. Cunningham. The problem for IBM isn’t the quality of its products, or the impressive amount of research it puts into adapting Web-based collaboration for the enterprise (IBM doesn’t break out its...

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IBM outlined a vision—and of course a new services unit to go with it—that takes a little time to grok. Big Blue talked about the “information journey,” fact-based enterprises and nudging out gut calls in everyday management for decisions based on hard, cold facts. But when you boil it all down, Big Blue is talking about providing a bag of algorithms that will automate many of your...

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Software vendors are blackmailing customers, misleading them about future product releases, and selling them consulting services that are nothing more than sophisticated product pitches, blogs Ray Wang, a leading enterprise software analyst with Forrester Research. Wang protects the identities of the companies in question, but his readers have chimed right in to identify SAP and Oracle as among...

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The other day I compiled a series of questions for the Associated Press, given that the organization has indicated that it plans some strategy to deal with sites that “walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.” One of the questions was essentially what AP wanted to get. The obvious answer was money, and a potential new partnership is showing one of the ways AP wants to get it....

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Being popular can be dangerous if the attention brings liabilities. Microsoft found that true when, back in 2005 and 2006, many of the new Xbox 360s developed the “red ring of death,” eventually forcing the company in 2007 to extend the product warranty and take over a billion dollar charge to cover the necessary repairs and replacements. Now there’s a new problem, called the...

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