Technology Industry Archive

Back in April, there were plenty of headlines announcing a big drop in Yahoo’s revenue and profit when the company released its Q1 numbers. Unfortunately, the 10-Q is never out when the earnings release hits the wires, and it’s only about a month or so later that you can start to see what actually happened. In this case, although there have been significant changes since 2008, the...

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Google, Microsoft and Apple have all been rumored to be poking around at Twitter, the hot new social media sensation, with good reason. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and Twitter have been playing follow-the-leader with each other. Google recently introduced Profiles in an attempt to create its own social network before Facebook locks down every friend-seeking user on the Internet; Facebook,...

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Facebook, one of the fastest-growing cloud companies around, keeps personal information on millions of users in the cloud, but isn’t very keen on the cloud when it comes to its own IT management data. While in San Diego at the Service-now.com user conference, I ran into a couple of IT admins from Facebook who told me they were <i>”thinking about”</i> using...

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Steve Jobs is supposed to reclaim his perch as CEO of Apple next month, but no one knows for sure. Except, of course, for Apple’s board of directors, which probably does. This brings us to the propriety of Eric Schmidt’s place at the table, as a director of both Apple and Google, which competes with Apple in many areas and may in several others before everything is said and done....

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In its latest quarterly announcement, satellite radio carrier Sirius XM tried to sound upbeat. But even as CEO Mel Karmazin tried to point to signs of increased cash flow, the bigger issue became subscriber loss. But the customer count downturn is older than one quarter, and what’s getting lost in the shuffle is just how much auto sales and new subscribers have masked the long-term...

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With a new administration and new Secretary of Commerce comes a new head of the US Patent and Trademark Office — an administrative body of particularly keen import to the high tech industry. After years of the USPTO and the patent bar often sniping at each other, new leadership could mean a chance to improve the way things work at the office. And now the choice is down to two candidates...

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HP, BMC, and other legacy software vendors are in danger of losing a strategic foothold in enterprise IT departments to insurgent Service-now.com, which could eventually lead to overall account losses. Service-now.com sells software used by IT departments to support corporate networks. Its application is a scaled-down version of application suites such as HP’s OpenView and BMC’s...

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For the last couple of years, BDO Seidman has gone through the 10-K filings of the hundred largest (based on revenues) publicly-held U.S. high tech firms and compiled the most-commonly cited risk factors. Although many of the factors will be obvious, and clearly of interest beyond the sector, what is interesting is looking how the list from this year compares to that of last year and how the...

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Amazon’s emphasis on the Kindle has been obvious. But rather than being a simple extension of the company’s focus, you could say that the device is a natural outgrowth of a longer term trend at Amazon — the process of becoming an electronics company, not a media company. And results over the last few years clearly show this. Last summer, I argued that Amazon was moving more...

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iPhone maker Apple and BlackBerry vendor Research in Motion are exchanging high-caliber bursts in the form of tantalizing new mobile applications in their desperate efforts to woo new users. Recent figures show that underdog BlackBerry is not just making it a close fight, but could emerge victorious. When Apple launched the iPhone, most observers saw it as a purely consumer device that would...

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