Author: Tom Nolle

Yahoo surprised investors by backpedaling on returning cash to investors from their exit of their China Alibaba Group position.  Though Mayer hasn’t said what she’d do with the money instead, one obvious possibility is M&A.  There has been talk about having Yahoo develop or acquire platform service capabilities that would exploit social and mobile trends,…

AT&T’s decision to buy NextWave is clearly a gamble, though insiders tell me that it’s not as much a wing and a prayer as it might seem.  NextWave has a bunch of 2.3GHz spectrum (WCS or Wireless Communications Services) that was never certified for mobile use, and the payoff for the deal seems linked to…

Ben Verwaayen, in an interview with the Financial Times, took responsibility for Alcatel-Lucent’s problems, which is fair given that he’s the CEO.  My only issue is that I think he’s looking at the WRONG issues.  Ben seems to think the problem was too much optimism two months ago.  I think it was too much inertia…

According to the running commentary after the announcement, Oracle’s purchase of Xsigo is a step toward SDNs, or maybe it’s to go after VMware in network virtualization, or to boost its cloud credentials.  And I thought coverage of the Nicira deal was vacuous!  Of course, the Xsigo probably doesn’t do any of these things, and…

It’s still earnings season and so we’re getting fewer product announcements and more financial ones.  You can still learn a lot from the numbers, obviously, so we’ll look today at the latest revelations and what they might mean. Facebook surprised the Street with a loss, due to employee stock compensation costs.  Revenue and profit ex…

Earnings reports always give you something, but they don’t always give you conclusive answers.  So it was yesterday with three tech companies, Apple, Netflix, and Juniper.  These three players epitomize the new network ecosystem and its confusion. Apple missed, no question about it, but there is a significant question on whether the miss really means…

Cisco says that they’re laying off another 1300 workers or about 2% of their employee base.  VMware says it’s buying Nicira.  Are these two things related?  I think they are. Nicira is a “network virtualization” player, a company who has built a connectivity layer on top of traditional networking and used that layer to offer…

As you all know, I like to read the earnings reports to spot critical trends, both with the companies themselves and for the markets they play in.  Microsoft and Google both reported earnings yesterday, and both gave the markets an upside surprise.  So what does that mean? Media coverage of Microsoft has missed the point. …

Intel reported its quarter, and the numbers were better than many had feared, though sales in the PC market grew only 4% while they grew by 15% in the data center.  In some ways, the picture is a bit of a poster-child for the cloud, and there were aspects of the earnings call that also…

We promised to let you know when material is available for our new video information service, and today is the day.  The website is live at http://www.ohnayitshay.com/ and we’ve posted our first video.  Our next step is to start doing hangouts, and we’re soliciting interest in doing a hangout (as a participant) on the topic…