Technology Industry Archive

How do you define greatness in a company? In the short run, maybe you can judge a company on its innovation, or exceptional creation of shareholder value. Dell was once a great company, but lost its edge just around the time it started crowing that “Dude, you got a PC.” Apple was a great company that became decidedly mediocre before becoming great again (for the time being). Both...

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Some investors have been complaining, and filing suit, over the proposed Oracle acquisition of Sun, claiming that the latter is going too cheaply. Now, as the SEC filings are appearing, Sun’s position is something like the person of easy virtue, who started saying “Oh, I’d never,” and then ended up with, “Oh, I think I did.” And what is turning up in the...

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If you’re tired of everyone and their mother claiming that theirs and theirs alone is the true incarnation of The Cloud, hope is at hand. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has produced a working draft that defines various aspects of cloud computing, which may finally put a lid on the dubious claims put out by many vendors. Even last summer, Datamation’s Mike...

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Sony’s overall numbers are in with a big annual loss. That means it’s time for one of our periodic looks at the PS3. And while I know the fans won’t like this, the data shows that the trend line of sales is flattening, with a projection showing the start of a unit sales decline this year, even as competitors Microsoft and Nintendo have held up under the recession. That raises...

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The Obama Administration’s budget blueprint for 2010, a memo released Monday, looks like a wet dream for cloud computing companies. In keeping with these “stimulating” times, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) plans to increase spending sharply in 2010, but promises this will result in significant cost savings in the future. The Administration said it will create a...

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Although we look at plenty of tech-related issues on BNET, we don’t typically write about the legal industry at large. However, there’s an issue brewing in the form of a class action suit that will likely cause some good-sized waves, if not a tsunami, over whether big corporate law firms are overcharging their clients for electronic legal research. Given how often high tech...

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As my colleague Michael Hickins noted, among other things, Apple has long encouraged a mythological image of perfection by presenting products as self-contained black boxes that should be, as much as possible, wholly a product of Apple. But the image has been cracking of late, and the company’s own actions show tacit, if not explicit, acknowledgment. When it comes to security, Apple...

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Oracle’s acquisition of Virtual Iron, announced yesterday, raised a lot of eyebrows. Why the heck does a company that already has open source hypervisor technology of its own and is acquiring even more virtualization technology from Sun, need yet more virtualization technology in its portfolio? One issue the acquisition cleared up, however, is why Oracle had been disseminating...

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Apple is much beloved by its devotees and despised by most of the rest of the world, and that seems to working for now. But the times they are a’ changing, as Steve Jobs can verify in his own iTunes library, and a greater number of people than ever expect to be treated like grown-ups by the vendors who sell to them. Apple is currently making news for its adamant opposition to so-called...

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Intel is painting itself as being a victim of its own success, but the giant semiconductor vendor has already victimized the market more than enough. The record $1.5 billion fine — and changes to its business practices — imposed by the European Commission’s competition committee for abusing its dominant position in the chip market, comes too late to save AMD, which has had to...

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