Technology Industry Archive

The news of Twitter in discussions with Hollywood for a Twitter-inspired TV show seems like the silly type of thing you’d have heard during the dot com boom. It seems to be reality show meets fad. But let’s assume for a moment that the people involved are not nuts. I started thinking about this and realized that Twitter could — and, more importantly, already does —...

More...

I have seen the future of Twitter, and it is Google Wave — which trumps Tweeting by allowing “the merging of documents, feeds, photos, e-mail, instant messaging, [and] event planning” in real-time. Twitter is many things, I suppose, but one of its highly-touted functions is to give its users a sense of the temperature of the Web, an immediate and almost visual sense of what...

More...

In the last few years, even in the face of its piles of money, Microsoft has developed something of a reputation for stumbling. Whether Vista disaster or online ineptitude, the pundit view has often been of a company that was clearly losing it. But as recent news is suggesting, Microsoft may be in a groove that the company has rarely seen before, and could be on the crest of simultaneous...

More...

With Wave, which Google previewed for developers at its I/O conference yesterday, developers can for the first time create Web-based applications that compete with Microsoft in terms of quality (while utterly trumping it on price). It also creates the conditions for customers to comfortably shuck off the shackles of installed software — including Office and other Microsoft products...

More...

The various press summaries of Dell’s performance last quarter largely focused on falling revenue and profit. But if you look at little deeper at the numbers, Dell actually didn’t take a sudden dive off a cliff, and things aren’t as bad as they seem on the surface in the near term. But, long term, R&D spending that is low relative to competitors could create a problem....

More...

AT&T’s reaction to Apple playing footsie with Verizon was to buy a cute pair of pumps of its own. If you haven’t seen those nice LTEs, they’re over by the Ferragamos, Jimmy Choos and GSMs. AT&T not only admitted that its network wasn’t doing the iPhone (or any other smartphone) justice, but promised to remedy the shortcoming in very short order. The carrier...

More...

The rumors of Apple planning on a billion dollar server farm are hot and heavy. It may be so much talk, the general idea might be right but the amount grossly exaggerated, or it could be accurate. Apple certainly has need for servers — maybe management’s hoping that more hardware might fix the noted problems with MobileMe, and it does have all that iTune business. But there have...

More...

Apple has finagled a $300 million tax cut from North Carolina lawmakers in exchange for investing $1 billion over nine years for a so-called technology “hub.” The deal is as shrouded in mystery as an Orson Welles movie, with dark subplots and hidden agendas. The bill has been written with a single company in mind, but doesn’t name it. No one in state government officially...

More...

The latest estimates on technology wages in the US are in from tech recruiting firm Yoh. Their take “[b]ased on conversations with more than 9,000 hiring managers in over 15 major metropolitan areas” is that — surprise, surprise — wages are pretty flat compared to 2009. Here’s a look at the data: The way such indexes work is that some period — in this case,...

More...

Sometimes I’m torn on a headline. In this case, I considered writing that Sirius XM was trying to rewrite its past and future, because that is essentially what it’s trying to do. Via Silicon Alley Insider, I heard about CEO Mel Karmazin’s presentation at the annual shareholder’s meeting. It smacks of management trying to pretty up what has happened and what might....

More...