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The Obama Administration's budget blueprint for 2010, a memo released Monday, looks like a wet dream for cloud computing companies. In keeping with these "stimulating" times, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) plans to increase spending sharply in 2010, but promises this will result in signif...
Although we look at plenty of tech-related issues on BNET, we don't typically write about the legal industry at large. However, there's an issue brewing in the form of a class action suit that will likely cause some good-sized waves, if not a tsunami, over whether big corporate law firms are overcharging their clients for electronic legal research. Given how often high tech companies must retail law firms, I thought this might be particularly trenchant for them, though probably of interest in virtually any other industry as well.
As my colleague Michael Hickins noted, among other things, Apple has long encouraged a mythological image of perfection by presenting products as self-contained black boxes that should be, as much as possible, wholly a product of Apple. But the image has been cracking of late, and the company's own actions show tacit, if not explicit, acknowledgment.
Oracle's acquisition of Virtual Iron, announced yesterday, raised a lot of eyebrows. Why the heck does a company that already has open source hypervisor technology of its own and is acquiring even more virtualization technology from Sun, need yet more virtualization technology in its portfolio? One ...
Apple is much beloved by its devotees and despised by most of the rest of the world, and that seems to working for now. But the times they are a' changing, as Steve Jobs can verify in his own iTunes library, and a greater number of people than ever expect to be treated like grown-ups by the vendors ...
Intel is painting itself as being a victim of its own success, but the giant semiconductor vendor has already victimized the market more than enough. The record $1.5 billion fine -- and changes to its business practices -- imposed by the European Commission's competition committee for abusing its do...
It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about the danger of antitrust actions in high tech. In fact, it was, and at the time I mentioned the speculation that Intel would face a walloping antitrust fine from the EU today. And so it does: €1.06 billion, or about $1.44 billion. When you read ...
I understand why my colleague Michael Hickins thinks that Microsoft's plans for issuing $3.75 billion in bonds would be an acquisition. But I'm going to take another side of the argument -- that Microsoft's goals are more limited and more openly stated. First, $3.75 billion, while a boat load of mo...
Microsoft is raising $3.75 billion through a bond offering that should be candy to Wall Street. Moody's Investor Services rates the bonds AAA because of "the company's position as the world's largest software company with a strong and defensible market position throughout its diverse core offerings....
To traditional corporate views, say on pay -- or the ability for shareholders to have a direct say on executive compensation -- is anathema. But shareholder initiatives are coming up in an increasing number of annual meetings at tech companies, and chances are that more than one will ultimately end ...
I noted in an earlier post that software vendors like SAP and Oracle have been abusing customers through various means just short of legal extortion. Customers have complained about vendors forcing them to purchase applications they don't need just to meet artificial and internal quotas, and to pay ...
No one likes to be a target of government investigation. But given the Obama administration's stated interests, and the modus operandi of the high tech industry, there could be a clash that will have corporations and executives hiring lawyers for antitrust defense. The Department of Justice yesterd...
By releasing a new service pack for Office that includes support for the open document format (ODF), Microsoft appears to be complying with European demands that it play well with others, while putting to rest accusations by IBM that it is still trying to maintain a monopoly over document formats. B...
One of the big levers, both in profit and power, which Apple has had with the iPhone has been the ability to control the sale of apps. Companies that didn't toe the line could always be cut-off, and Apple would get a cut of app sales. But this morning, Amazon announced something that has effectively illustrates a way to walk around Apple and begin encourage more direct sales relationships with customers.
Search is the main way people navigate the Web these days, but video remains an exception. Video sites like market leader YouTube and its fast-charging rival, NBC Universal-owned Hulu, get the lion's share of their video traffic by getting customers to go directly to their sites, in contrast to most...
