Technology Industry Archive

Yesterday, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 to $299. It’s undoubtedly intended to drive increased volume. But the really interesting story is how margins on the device allow Amazon to sell e-books below cost and convert enough customers that it can make itself the de facto sole outlet for books and virtually own the publishing industry. This is a story built on numbers. Start with...

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There’s now something called the Google stack: it starts with an operating system called Chrome, a browser of the same name, the forthcoming Wave productivity, communications and collaboration application, a separate set of Google Apps (which includes secure email and chat), and a burgeoning developer community. The importance of the latter cannot be overemphasized, because as...

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Today, Cisco announced that Ned Hooper would become its chief strategy officer, “developing Cisco’s business strategy and identifying market transitions,” according to the press release. That raises the question of where Cisco may be going. My colleague Michael Hickins last month said that he saw the company as having an insufficiently “deep bench” in the...

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Google’s new Chrome operating system is going to clean up the netbook market within five years (or as soon as HP and other vendors get out from under their OEM deals with Microsoft), leaving Microsoft with an increasingly marginalized desktop PC market for its Windows operating system. Google says it has already signed up vendors who will ship netbooks running Chrome by the end of 2010,...

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With Google’s announcement of a Chrome-based PC operating system, you could almost hear the cheers from pundits hot for something to gnash for months, people who hate Microsoft, and the Google true-believers. It’s an announcement that goes hand-in-hand with the word that the beta tag is now dropped from Google Apps. However, those who think that Microsoft’s days are numbered...

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The official word is that Google has dropped the beta tag from Google Apps. Combined with the announcement of a Chrome-based operating system coming out next year, and you can see that the company has tossed a gauntlet northward toward Redmond. However, there’s a lot more to being ready for enterprise customers, and market share, than dropping a word off a web page. After all,...

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Google has taken the “beta” label off many of its products, particularly those aimed at enterprise customers. Those products include productivity tools (Google Apps), calendar, email and chat. In addition, Google has made improvements that should help IT administrators transition from licensed software from Microsoft and IBM to Google’s apps. But Google has done more than shed...

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It was just last month that I wrote the post Hardware Wants To Be Free as a response to something that Simon Dumenco wrote at Advertising Age. His premise was that a free netbook as a come-on to a subscription-based content service (whether video or e-book) might be the savior of media. I extended the concept, suggesting that the marginal cost of hardware is plummeting so quickly that soon much...

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In part 1 of this three part look at Amazon’s strategy through patent filings, I mentioned the personalized libraries concept, in which people buying books and other media would also get electronic versions that would form a personal database of electronic versions they could search. I looked at one patent brought up by Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost News, and the fuller implications of...

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Chris Anderson’s most recent crusade, which he makes in The Future of a Radical Price, isn’t actually very radical. However, his conclusion — which is that businesses should embrace “free” as a pricing concept — has triggered several rounds of arguments among finance writer Malcolm Gladwell, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, fellow blogger Phil Wainewright, and...

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