Author: Tom Nolle

We’ve got more signs of change from the earnings announcements, and as always change is good for some and bad for others.  There does seem a bit of a bias toward bad-ness, though. Nokia is going to shift Symbian support to Accenture and cut 4000 jobs.  The move illustrates that there are significant challenges for…

Barnes & Noble has finally brought out a true (if dated) Android version for their color Nook, which likely makes it the cheapest tablet around.  It’s clear from both the performance and features of the new release and the pronouncements of the company that this isn’t intended to be a general-purpose tablet, but it’s also…

Two “tech embarrassments” lead the news today, and there’s at least one lesson to be learned from each of them.  Amazon had a cloud outage that disrupted some websites, and both Apple and Google are accused of tracking users with their smartphone technology. The Amazon outage was apparently related to its distributed RDBMS, though precise…

Tech earnings are demonstrating again that the global economy is recovering, and also demonstrating some of the dynamics within the tech market.  Yesterday, IBM, Intel, and Juniper reported, and there’s something to learn from them all. IBM revenues overall were up 8% and earnings up 10%, and the IT giant raised its forecast for the…

Nobody doubts that we’re seeing a revolution in video, but there are revolutions and revolutions, and it’s not yet clear just how sweeping the video change will be.  Some recent data from Nielson seems to show that while online video viewing is increasing, it’s increasing primarily within a largely static group.  Not only that, the four-hours-plus…

Economic news is largely lacking today but the markets appear to be headed for another downturn, driven perhaps again by speculative short selling ahead of earnings season.  Monetary and economic data worldwide isn’t suggesting any problem at this point, but it does seem to me that the stock market is trending a bit ahead of…

An industry consolidating is an industry commoditizing at the product/service level, and that’s obviously happening in telecom.  The AT&T bid for T-Mobile has now been followed by a Level 3 bid for Global Crossing; both are subject to regulatory approval, of course. The simple reason for all of this is disintermediation, the fact that operators…

Lots of interesting and potentially pivotal happenings in tech, and perhaps the most interesting thing is that the real meanings of all of these happenings are more important than the surface topics! AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile, which is no surprise given that DT has been looking for years at selling its US property and…

Yesterday wasn’t a happy day for global markets, but it’s already looking like sanity might prevail.  Most on the Street realize that Japan isn’t a large enough chunk of the global economic pie to cause a major disruption even if we presumed that their economy was wrecked—which it’s not.  There will be short-term dislocations as…

The nuclear situation in Japan is now starting to rattle markets that were previously prepared to shrug off the disaster in the context of global economic recovery.  At this point, I still believe that the issue is short-selling by hedge funds rather than any indication that the disaster will impact global economics in the longer…