Technology Industry Archive

Two diametrically different companies — Fortune 100 IT vendor HP, and tiny Norwegian browser company Opera – have separately demonstrated how a subtle but important shift in the technology landscape could eat into the fabric of Google’s revenue tapestry. According to HP’s Billy Hoffman, who described to me the research he’s going to present at the Black Hat conference...

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Oracle is putting out the word that it’s gaining market share at the expense of SAP to distract attention from its declining revenues and profits, but the numbers put the lie to the spin. Oracle held its own in database and middleware revenues, where it doesn’t compete with SAP, but in applications, where it does go head to head with the business applications vendor, new license...

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Statistics are a dangerous tool in the hands of the unwary or uncaring. If you don’t know how they work, you can be conned, and if you don’t care about how you use them, you can fool at least some of the people some of the time. In high tech, the people fooled are often in the press, a fact PR people well know. The latest use hitting my desk is by Eskenzi PR & Marketing for...

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Listening to GameStop is like hearing an investment bank’s CEO in March 2008 telling stockholders not to worry, that all is well and in control. Of course, little would have been well and nothing was in control. GameStop management is whistling past the graveyard. Just as a report comes out of how company management has decided that downloading simply isn’t in the near-term cards...

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In a classic case of two big companies, each with its own set of dysfunctional business units and competing products, smashing into each other like particles in a Large Hadron Collider in the hopes of discovering the meaning of life, Nokia and Intel have decided to throw in their chips together. In the feverish delusion of the executives who cooked up this Frankenstein’s supercomputing...

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Back in April, after announcing a bad quarter, Yahoo said that it would trim an additional five percent of its workforce, roughly 700 people, on top of the 1,600 laid off last year. A new SEC filing shows how much the additional layoffs cost the company. According to a current Form 8-K/A, Yahoo at the time couldn’t estimate the price tag for the additional cut. Now the company pegs the...

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Barak Obama last week announced David Kappos as his choice to head the US Patent and Trademark Office. That wasn’t completely unexpected — in fact, back in May, I suggested that evidence indicated that Kappos would get the nod. The question now is what this means for high tech and other industries. As I mentioned in May, the background of Kappos is big high tech personified. More...

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Apple and Google have begun a revolution in mobile computing, but they won’t be the ones to finish it. They will have their part in the world to come, but the true masters of the mobile application space are unknown and probably manifold. End users have already shown that they’re even ready to pay for mobile applications, in contrast to applications they download to their laptops....

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MySpace may have taken an ax to roughly 30 percent of its U.S. employees, but that’s nothing compared to what owner News Corp. is doing in other countries. An elimination of upwards of two-thirds of non-American staff suggest that the company is going to focus most of its resources on one or two markets where it thinks it has the best chance to actually make money. According to the...

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IBM’s $100 million investment in mobile applications is as safe a bet as covering both odd and even numbers on the roulette wheel. Mobile applications are growing thanks to the popularity of social networks on mobile devices, improvements in Web-browsing technology, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that mobile enterprise applications have become critical to professional users....

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