Technology Industry Archive

Joe Tucci, the CEO of data storage vendor EMC, isn’t your typical Silicon Valley-Cambridge technology executive, less Steve Jobs than swift jabs and uppercuts. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped a couple of f-bombs when NetApp, number two in the storage market behind EMC, tried to horn in on EMC’s customers. Data deduplication is a hot area because it can help customers...

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Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Bilski v. Doll, which means that virtually every industry, and especially high tech, will be waiting to see how the United States will handle method patents. If the court upholds the ruling of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, an untold number of patents could become instantly invalid. The Bilski case is one that has centered on...

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Could Salesforce be reengineering its AppExchange platform to run standards-based code like HTML 5? The reason I ask is that none other than Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff listed his status on Facebook this weekend as: “working on salesforce.com’s new architecture.” There would have to be a very good reason, or a transformational event like Google’s introduction of its...

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Why are Microsoft and Dell seeking to temper enthusiasm about a possible warming trend in our winter of economic discontent? Are they more skillful progonsticators than other tech bellwethers, or are they simply trying to protect their collective behinds behind the recession’s macroeconomic skirts? Steve Ballmer must be preparing for his second career by reading economist Nouriel Roubini,...

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There’s a smoldering fight between Robert Scoble, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg over whether to talk about Web 3.0, as the AllthingsDigital crowd would have it, or “2010 Web,” as Scoble suggests. All of them have it wrong. Web 3.0 sounds even more contrived than Web 2.0 ever did; Scoble, on the other hand, argues that “2010 Web” communicates a sense of urgency...

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In a changing of the economic guard, Cisco was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average this morning at the expense of General Motors. But while the promotion may be a sign of the company’s adaptability in the face of troubled economic times, Cisco’s ascendancy may be as short-lived as the communications platform it’s proposing. CEO John Chambers boasted for the better part...

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Qualcomm’s answer to Intel’s Atom processor is called Snapdragon, but there’s a lot more to this rivalry than catchy names. As Google’s introduction of Wave, and Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone have made clear, the time is ripe for an explosion of low-cost, light-weight devices running cloud-based rather than locally-installed applications. With Google providing an...

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It’s been clear for a while that Sony’s game division has been in a world of competitive pain. The Playstation 3 still seems to lose money on every sale, with software title royalties not being enough to keep the organization in the black, and PS3 unit sales have flattened and are trending down. Now there’s news of a new Playstation Portable model, the PSP Go, which is due for...

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Apple recently announced that iPhone and iPod users could experience a small electrical shock when using ear buds. An annoyance, perhaps, but not as big as serious iPhone overheating. Over the last two years, there have been reported incidents of iPhones overheating. Apparently the problem is still around, as I just heard from a major tech executive that his wife’s iPhone has been...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits. UK Court takes eBay side over L’Oréal — French cosmetics company L’Oréal has undertaken a hundred lawsuits against eBay in Europe over sales of its products and of alleged counterfeits. The UK’s High Court has said that eBay has “no legal duty” to protect...

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