Technology Industry Archive

Challenger, Gray & Christmas came out with the on CEO departures through May. Interestingly, while the number is lower this year than at the same time last, tech industry CEOs have left in higher number. Before we get into the tech specifics, take a look at the overall numbers and how they’ve trended over the last five years: Note that the pace higher water hit in 2007, a full year...

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Apple has enjoyed immense popularity among consumers, but has had a hard time penetrating the enterprise for a number of reasons, most notably security. As Eric Auchard noted, few employees have enough clout to demand that IT allow them to introduce an iPhone or Apple laptop into an otherwise Windows environment. Good thing for Apple, then, that Microsoft has changed its approach to network...

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Merrill Lynch cut its rating on SAP from buy to neutral, saying that it doesn’t see a corporate IT spending recovery in 2009, so there is question as to the company’s assumptions on license fees. But that hardly seems like a uniform take of the market on the software industry, which is more mixed and less certain. Yesterday, Standard & Poor’s raised the rating on...

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By releasing its new plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, Google has again signaled its interest in the business user market. It’s also a signal that the company is stuck and badly needs to embrace an old tech rule: It’s tough to make it in the productivity apps business if you only appeal to consumers. For Google, getting apps and services users is critical, because the company is...

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The number of wildly different takes on the “success” of mobile advertising is dizzying. But the big lesson appears to be that while somebody is selling something, it’s probably not to consumers through their cell phones. Take a look at this array of pronouncements and findings about the state of the mobile advertising industry: According to The Kelsey Group, mobile local...

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Bad economic times and a focus on reducing IT budgets have made this a tough market for enterprise software vendors. According to the new Forrester study, The State Of Enterprise Software: 2009, executives had better not plan on that changing in the near future. However, there is some good news for vendors, because it’s not as though companies have stopped spending on software. There are...

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Attempts by several state governments to dump Microsoft Office have died quiet deaths because of internecine squabbles within the open source community, a testament to vendor greed and a depressing reminder that the public interest often takes a back seat to moneyed interests. In 2005, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted rules prohibiting state agencies from using proprietary software,...

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Yesterday’s announced price drop for the current 8GB iPhone 3G could be seen as Apple addressing the issue of being perceived as too pricy. Granted, that might be true for some of the Apple products. But the new iPhone price suggests something far different. Apple is undertaking the first true price war in its history, shifting into defensive pricing out of concern for market share and...

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Blogging is in some ways the poster child for Web 2.0, which when you boil it down is an expression that signifies the Web’s evolution from a static publishing platform to a communications and collaboration medium. But blogging is now in serious decline, to be replaced by tools from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google. How do I know this? EMC, which is facing an uphill struggle for...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits. DoJ investigates high tech hiring — The Department of Justice is investigating whether a number of high tech companies are making anticompetitive agreements in hiring employees. [Source: Ars Technica] Dish to pay $103 million to TiVO — A court has ordered Dish Network to pay $103...

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