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Apple is about to repeat the same mistake with the iPhone that it committed with the Mac twenty-five years ago, and Google is going to end up with the lion's share of application sales. That said, most developers currently prefer the iTunes app store system for a number of reasons: customers ...
Former IBM IP legal chief David Kappos has been confirmed by the Senate just before it left for the summer recess, and so becomes the new Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, otherwise known as the head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He certainly understands patents and se...
Former IBM top IP lawyer David Kappos is officially one step closer to becoming the head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to the U.S. Senate's executive calendar for tomorrow (and thanks to Foley & Lardner partner Hal Wegner for passing this on), the Kappos nomination has becom...
Cisco knows it can't dominate the Web the way it did data centers for decades, but is articulating a vision that respects the heterogeneous aspect of the medium while satisfying the typically outsized ambitions of its leader, CEO John Chambers. I learned during a long phone coversation with Laure...
Last quarter's financials were a reminder of how brutal the economy, competition, and the general move toward electronic communications have been to printing at HP. Long a big profit mainstay, the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) saw Q2 net revenue drop from $7.64 billion in 2008 to $5.92 billion th...
Oracle's OpenOffice.org development team is testing a new user interface that resembles the "ribbon" interface that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007. This is far from the first attempt at breaking into the Microsoft desktop monopoly, but given Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's insatiable desire t...
The Twitter outage yesterday would have caused much uproar on the service had anyone been able to complain about it. Those in the media, frequently heavy users themselves (I include myself: @ErikSherman), poured on about the long incident. But I think that this was another in a list of prompts to as...
A variety of analyst sources are reporting that semiconductors may be on a bit of a rebound. Clearly it's too early to make any broad definitive statement, but on the plus side, indicators are up a bit in a variety of industry segments. Here are some of the data points:
AppleInsider has posted a story today about a new patent filing by Apple that would make it possible for portable devices to detect consumer abuse. For example, there would be evidence of exposure to cold, moisture, or heat at levels that would void a warranty. However, my own experience not only s...
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spends a lot of time publicly mocking netbooks and Linux. He did it again last week during his meeting with financial analysts. But netbooks and Linux are the very things that secretly keep Ballmer up at night, because they threaten not just a few points of market share h...
Palm seems to be on an exec hiring spree. Only, if you're a recruiter, don't bother to call unless you've got a line on talent from Apple. Palm just snagged its fourth executive that spent time in Cupertino. Maybe the company is taking to heart the concept of an Apple a day keeping the doctor away, but you have to wonder whether it would better focus on realizing that to train for the long haul, a wind Sprint might not be the best training regime.
Google Wave may have a brilliant future, but its present is frustrating developers who've had a chance to work with it. Ben Rometsch, director of the Solid State Group, told me that the Wave user interface "yearns for super-fast Javascript performance," but doesn't get it, is very slow to debug a...
Many in tech are looking toward mobile devices to take the place of standard PCs, creating new opportunities for the industry overall and a complete upset in the pecking order. Intel and Microsoft would no longer dominate. New technical capabilities would open new worlds of advertising and marketing, providing additional revenue sources. But for all the talk of Apple versus Palm versus RIM and the millions of units sold, it's sobering to step away from the Kool-Aid counter and remember that in the big world of mobile devices, smartphones are a drop in the bucket and a long way from dominating consumer choices.
Alcatel-Lucent, the Franco-American marriage that seemed doomed from the start, continues to plod along, and expects to break even this year after a rocky recent past. The telecommunications systems vendor's results reflects the various markets it serves and tells us a lot about which markets are lo...
Apple will probably unveil its long-rumored tablet-type PC this fall, a device that is expected to be something between the iPod Touch and a netbook or smartbook, although probably priced on the high end of the netbook scale. Apple hasn't dilly-dallied for this long, however, just to introduce a min...
