Author: Tom Nolle

The story that PC sales slipped in 4Q, first raised as a Microsoft comment yesterday, is now being quasi-confirmed by more detailed shipment data released by various Wall Street researchers.  One, citing Gartner, says that y/y growth in PC sales was well below seasonality in the quarter, and the expectation overall is that PC sales…

Surprise, surprise!  The latest data from the European Telecommunications Operators Association shows that costs are up and revenues are down, and the author wonders how long this sort of imbalance can go on without compromising spending.  Maybe it already has; we noted that Acme Packet showed weakness that could be a symptom of a capex…

I’ve got a kind of “tale of two TVs” today, if that’s not too euphonic for you!  The big story at CES may not be tablets after all, but Google TV.  And the biggest IPTV success story may be doubling down on their approach, but shifting to Microsoft’s  Mediaroom. Google has tried TV already, and…

Acme Packets, one of the growth leaders in the network equipment space as far as the Street was concerned, did a surprise pre-announce of a less-than-expected quarter.  Supporters of the company have rallied around the notion that this is somehow just a transient blip.  Yet the company told investors that the shortfall came from a…

It’s the last workday of 2011 and everyone seems to be doing a retrospective, but I’m not going to do that!  What’s the point of blogging if you rake up the past anyway? There are more stories today about both Apple’s and Google’s possible plans in the TV space.  One of the popular ones (for…

With a record number of activations for iOS and Android devices, it’s pretty clear that the mobile appliance is here to stay.  Given that Microsoft has been little more than a kid with nose pressed to the candy store window in the holiday race, I think it’s also likely that the giant software firm has…

Akamai has won a reputed battle with AT&T and Juniper over mobile-content-optimizer Cotendo, a company that gets described as a “cloud” player by the media in keeping with the current notion that anything that’s not cloud is not newsworthy.  This is interesting, not for the “cloud” aspect but for the fact that it speaks volumes…

Tech giant Oracle reported, and it wasn’t pretty.  For the first time in a very long time, Oracle disappointed in both performance and guidance.  Pretty much every aspect of its business was weaker than the Street expected, but the hardware guidance (off next year 4% to 14%) was considered dreadful by many.  This is one…

IBM is telling Barron’s that analytics is the next big thing, and they’ve got enough historicity in the “correct” column of the tech ledger that we have to take them seriously.  IBM and Northwestern are even going to have an academic program focused on analytics. The only problem I have with the statement is that…

RIM turned in a truly ugly quarter and announced its new handset family would be late.  The company is a poster child for the biggest challenge in technology, which is how a company that’s very successful under a given market paradigm can confront a major paradigm shift.  RIM was king of the smartphone when the…