A day after the big announcement that Google would buy Motorola Mobility, we’re seeing a lot of reaction in the technology and financial media. When I blogged on this yesterday I focused on what I thought would be the really significant and non-obvious ramifications of the deal. Today I want to look at some of…
Google, ever a shaker of markets, has certainly given the mobile market the greatest shaking since Android, even the greatest since the iPhone. They plan to buy Motorola Mobility, the mobile appliance arm of Motorola, in an all-cash deal. The deal will at once make Google one of the major manufacturers of smartphones and tablets,…
Those who hope to find fiber broadband snaking through their neighborhoods will be unhappy when they read a Reuters interview with Verizon’s CFO. Those who have followed my research on the subject of broadband profitability won’t be surprised, though. What Shammo said was that FiOS won’t be as profitable to Verizon as wireline had been,…
Cisco’s quarterly earnings call was in one sense a far cry from the previous one, but it was still not exactly a return to the glory days when everyone wanted to be “the next Cisco”. The company narrowly beat estimates and it guided to 1% to 4% growth for the current quarter. It’s this guidance…
Data for the last quarter shows that cable and satellite TV providers lost a significant number of customers, and while the media is declaring this to be a victory for OTT video I think that’s an oversimplification. There are major changes in video consumption, some driven by technology, some by economics, and some by population…
Strikes against telcos aren’t anything new, but Verizon’s current strike may be of special significance because it’s coming at a time when the company is wrestling with a question no one ever believed would be asked; is there any future in telephony? While Verizon has been profitable, the profits aren’t extravagant by any measure of…
With Brocade’s cut in guidance on its earnings call, the company joined what seemed a parade of network equipment vendors who’ve called the future of network spending into question. Most Wall Street analysts have suggested that Ethernet is coming under pressure and that corporate IT spending is likely to be weak. Both are likely true,…
A number of interesting but small new items have emerged in the tech world, and so we’ll do a quick analysis of them before tackling the ugly economic picture. We’re going to range from network capex to virtualization, but perhaps in the opposite order. VMware has decided that maybe its pricing was more of a…
Cisco is consolidating its video activities into a single unit and its Videoscape head is leaving. The decision seems an odd one to me if you look at things from a market perspective. Videoscape was arguably the most complete suite of content delivery elements available from anyone, but the sheer scope of the product seemed…
The FCC released its first fairly detailed study of Internet performance in promised-versus-delivered form, and while it has some interesting stuff in it, there’s also a rather substantial internal contradiction in the whole study that is troubling for our ability to set broadband policy. It seems the government has ignored the whole basis for IP…