Technology Industry Archive

We’ve seen Microsoft pay users in the past to search on Live.com. Now rumors are that the company is pursuing a more clever strategy of bribing providing incentives to not users, but sources. According to the Financial Times, Microsoft is talking to News Corp. and other publishers about taking their sites off Google and putting them on Bing. And it’s a smart enough strategy to...

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BusinessWeek has a story arguing that iPhone developers, sick of dealing with Apple, are jumping ship for Google’s Android. Cut the hype, and you see that, yes, there are problems and, yes, developers are also businesspeople pursuing long-term strategies that they’d chase anyway. I don’t think there’s anyone who could reasonably say that I was in the bag for Apple. And...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits. Vonage will pay to extricate itself from legal woes — VoIP provider Vonage (VG) will pay a total of $3 million to 32 states to settle an investigation into questions of whether the company made it difficult for consumers to cancel accounts and if it neglected to make clear that you have...

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According to a report in The Consumerist, Apple is telling some customers that smoking near a product covered under the AppleCare program voids the warranty. However, try to find that limitation in the policy wording. It doesn’t seem to be in there. Two different readers of Consumerist reported that Apple had said that second hand smoke traces in the returned equipment voided the warranty...

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Yesterday Google showed off its forthcoming Chrome OS, leaving many to wonder how exactly the company will monetize it. The answer: it won’t. Since Google derives 97% of its revenue from online ads, it simply wants you using a computer that is always online. Specifically, it wants you on a computer that is one click away from YouTube, which has been flourishing this quarter into a bona...

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Following the European Union’s review of the proposed Oracle-Sun deal, and Oracle’s response, makes you wonder whether continental regulators and Larry Ellison have an unquenchable taste for irony or are really interested in seeing Sun dead and buried, given that the review time has just extended another six days to January 27. Sun had been shopping itself around for a long time,...

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So Sony (SNE) has a great new: use a that new online service connecting gadgets to movies to help build brand loyalty. Too bad management is so completely out of touch with reality: Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the service, set for launch next year, highlights an advantage that Sony has over rivals like Samsung Electronics Co. and other manufacturers that don’t produce their...

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Google provided some details about its upcoming Chrome OS. Although the information was interesting, the session raised some questions about the operating system: Will regulators give Google a pass? Other browsers don’t run on Chrome, though people are free to take the source code and modify it to run around another browser. However, given the way governments in general, and the European...

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The auto industry has been facing it for years. And now it seems that the eye of California environmental regulators, in the form of the California Energy Commission, is settling on consumer electronics, with proposed standards on television energy consumption, according to AOL Daily Finance. That could mean de facto standards for the rest of the country, given the dynamics of electronics...

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Over on ZDNet’s Between the Lines, Larry Dignan makes the argument that we need a “beautiful mess” in operating systems, with many choices to run on a machine. As much as I respect Larry, I think he’s completely off-base. Some competition? Absolutely. A mess? Ultimately costly, unproductive, and of interest only to a select few, not the wide number of people who depend...

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