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This weekend, a reader emailed and upbraided me for missing that Microsoft had signed new parts deals and moved to a smaller GPU die, all of which should theoretically saved money and reduced the costs of the Xbox 360. We went back and forth a bit, only agreeing that Microsoft seemed desperate. In the process, I dug out the most recent 10K available, went though some explanations -- and came away more perplexed than ever.
This is the day of the big discount: all of Microsoft's Xbox 360 units have officially dropped price by $50, giving the company the cheapest entry point for the would-be gamer. But this smacks of desperation in a whole lot of ways, for example, like this being the second price drop Microsoft has tried this year alone. When you consider the number of units they sell normally and how financially badly that Microsoft does in this market, you have to wonder if even with those deep pockets it's possible to buy enough Christmas cheer.
MythBusters, the television story that experimentally examines urban myths, old wives' tales, and other popular wisdom, apparently backed down from examining RFID security when pressed by legal representatives from Texas Instruments and leading credit card organizations. That may have silenced some uncomfortable examination in the short run, but the companies have worked against their long-term interests.
Major Internet companies say that they inform their customers about privacy issues through specially written policies. What they don't say is that more often than not consumers would need college undergraduate educations or higher to easily wade through the verbiage.
Sometimes stories emerge because journalists get bored and long for some excitement, and one of the prime times for that is at the end of the summer. Given that anything Google is generally enough to grab attention, announcement of the new browser, Chrome, was guaranteed to become a hot topic in the business and tech circuits as people speculated whether it would "kill" Internet Explorer or be the "operating system" for cloud computing. Who cares? The fact is that we left the world of the single operating system years ago because that's not what is important to people. Interfaces are.
DSL Reports broke the story that Comcast is implementing a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap on residential users, starting October 1. Lots of consumers are grumbling, and some questioning whether they can trust the company to even fairly meter the traffic flow. But Comcast -- and its competitors -- will push on for two reasons. One is that they can't satisfy investor expectations of growing profits, and the other is that for years they have promised service that their infrastructure can't deliver.
The Inquirer ran a story about a new wave of Nvidia chip problems. Companies with semiconductor-based products might shake their heads sadly (with a smirk on competitors' faces), but what's happening with Nvidia should make everyone else think twice.
Dell's stock price has taken a small hammering as its margins have slumped. So far I've seen this attributed to expanded marketing expenses (probably associated with its move into Asia) and to a slowing economy. But I wonder to what degree falling margins and the need for the ongoing "turnaround" are results of previous feasting too heavily at the profit trough while pushing its partners out of the way.
There are times the US Patent & Trademark Office and large corporations can leave you scratching your head. As Om Malik reported, Microsoft has essentially received a patent on paging through a document by pressing keys on the keyboard, like page up and page down, for example. It's absurd, but more of a problem is that the big companies undercut any credibility they had (or didn't have) when they moan about patent trolls. If you're going to make everyone spend time on this level of nonsense, what ethical authority do you have to complain about the practices of others?
Microsoft is moving ahead with version 8 of Internet Explorer, but the browser has picked up some interesting privacy features. But aside from privacy concerns, an additional consequence would be to make targeted advertising harder to achieve, which means pressure on Google, a noted Microsoft rival.
Most companies start their existences in a general direction and then keep moving that way. But sometimes a company takes an unexpected turn, which might be hidden corporate DNA, a stroke of genius, or a mistake borne of managerial ego. Amazon's behavior suggests a major business model change is already underway.
Although I posted the conversation with attorney Robert Clothier about some of the legal considerations of blogging, his was a view through the eyes of media law. There's also a whole other way of looking at blogging when it comes to corporations. Labor and employment lawyer Devjani Mishra, a partner with Seyfarth Shaw LLP, was on the road ane unable to talk, but she did email some comments.
As the Patent Troll Tracker libel suit shows, blogging can bring up some intricate legal issues. Bloggers like Dennis Crouch can find themselves facing subpoenas. A few years ago, Apple sued some bloggers that revealed the date of a new product release; the company wanted the source of the information. And as Cisco is learning, employer bloggers can entangle their employers in legal action. We chatted with media lawyer Robert Clothier, a partner with Fox Rothschild LLP, about some of the questions that arise for the technology industry, where blogging sometimes seems as prevalent as engineering.
Since March, there's been a legal brouhaha in patent circles, as lawyer Eric Albritton sued a blogger as well as the blogger's former employer, Cisco, for libel. Now the dispute is spilling wider, as the plaintiff has sent a subpoena to a well-known law professor and blogger, Dennis Crouch, who wasn't part of the controversy at all. What's Albritton after? Only the identities of people who anonymously commented on Crouch's blog, Patently-O. Now there are probably prominent patent attorneys sweating because they left a comment and potentially could get dragged into the middle of the conflict.
One of the potentially clear areas of change in the face of a presidential election is foreign policy. As BusinessWeek pointed out, these are unpredictable times for military deployments and for the defense contractors that provide equipment. But any impact on defense spending won't stop there; many high tech companies could find sudden shifts in demand -- and possibly drops that they didn't expect.
