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Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise i...
My colleague Michael Hickins and I have disagreed at times over whether companies like Google or Apple. My skepticism has never been one of simply product function or cost, but rather an issue of what it takes to provide what an enterprise IT customer looks for. Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting discussion of this in the context of enterprise customers often demanding on-premise deployment, rather than SaaS delivery. And in his reporting is a nugget that suggests an entirely new business model that I'm calling peer-to-peer enterprise computing.
Nokia is rumored to be planning to introduce a netbook in 2010 running on Google's Android operating system. I wonder how that would sit with Intel, with whom Nokia just got in bed. Do they have an open marriage? Phil Goldstein fingers Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir as the source of t...
The U.S. Supreme Court made some important tech news today by refusing to hear two cases: one about a next generation digital video recorder, and another important patent case.
Wireless network operators have an unprecedented opportunity to jump off their churn and burn treadmill and create valuable and lasting relationships with end users, handset makers and application vendors and, if they really play their cards right, could even wean themselves off the handset subsidy ...
Here is a parable about Google that its executives seem to have forgotten: There once was a Web site so good that although all it ever did was send people away, they kept coming back, over and over and over again. Only to be sent away again. In fact, the only reason people keep coming back to this ...
Dell found in contempt; IBM fails to stop Dell hire of M&A exec; Apple-Psystar case to proceed and Apple sued by consumers again; Germany court readies to fine Rapidshare; the FCC has new chairman, commissioner; Nortel creditors want to halt unit sale to Nokia Siemens Networks; and the DOJ wants more time to vet Oracle-Sun deal.
Via the news letter of publishing consulting Bob Sacks, I learned of a student hoax that won a top prize from the magazine Paris Match. A pair from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts convinced a group of "experts" that a faked spread on "students prostituting themselves or looking for food in ...
You hear a lot of comparison between companies. Google will beat Microsoft, or Microsoft will devastate Google. Twitter will become the New Google, or the New Facebook, or the New Media. Yahoo will become the New Yahoo. You get the idea. But there are two things that become obvious when you think a moment. One is that all these companies are juggling for a future business landscape dominated by communications. The other is that they're all trying to fit a complex issue into their own undersized boxes.
According to iSuppli, the new Mac Mini is a heck of a lot more expensive to make than is usual for Apple. A $599 machine yields just over $200 in margin. For many companies, that would be slick. For Apple, with its legacy of high margin business, this is the financial equivalent of an earthquake. And it's yet the latest piece of evidence suggesting that on the computer front, and probably elsewhere as well, the days of enviable levels of profitability, and the ability to sell expensive hardware, are likely coming to an eventual end.
It's clear that the future of Palm rests on the Pre, as my colleague Michael Hickins noted. Much of the potential success of the Pre -- or any handset, as has been clear from Apple's wild success -- rides on the developers and companies that decide to create applications for the platform. And they are weighing a lot of factors to figure out where to focus their technical and marketing resources and what platforms to support.
A killer application has finally emerged that should allow smartphones to overtake conventional PCs and laptops as the computing device of choice: it's called augmented reality, and as absurd as that sounds, that's exactly what it is. Mobile applications consultant Tomi Ahonen wrote on his mobi...
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Dennis Howlett's analysis"][/caption] My recent post accusing Oracle of lying about its chief rival was close enough to the mark to get under Oracle's skin. Still, it had some holes I couldn't fill, not least of which because of different...
Palm CEO Jonathan Rubinstein doesn't think he has to beat the brains out of former employer Apple, or any other smartphone vendor, in order for Palm to succeed. It's a remarkably calm assessment from the leader of a company whose future depends largely on the success of a single product launch, and ...
In the book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that consumers buy goods because of subconscious, deeply-seated motivation to find mates and procreate. And a prime example of a company that has ridden Darwin all the way to the bank is Apple.
