Microsoft reported its numbers, and the results are interesting for what they say about the computer market overall. The entertainment side was very strong, thanks to Kinect, but Windows licenses were lower and this trend worried investors. In the middle, the server and Office franchises both delivered strong results. So what does this mean? Let’s…
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…
We have today a kind of interesting counterpoint between online value and online risk, and also a demonstration that Orwell was right in his famous trio of seeming contradictions. Sony’s PlayStation network has been hacked and considerable information stolen, and Microsoft and Google are battling over just who has the best online document tools. Personal…
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…
Amazon has finally restored the “great majority” of its EC2 customers after a failure on its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) cloud DBMS left websites in limbo. The outage has already generated more than its share of commentary, and as usual there are more extreme views than useful ones. Some say that the problem demonstrates that…
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…
There were a lot of happy smiles on the Street yesterday as stocks skyrocketed, and things aren’t looking too shabby today either. Apple and GE posted better-than-expected numbers and at least for the moment the hope of an earnings-season blowout is overcoming concerns about Eurozone debt, US deficits, and even some uneasy unemployment numbers. Apple…
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…
Yesterday wasn’t pretty in the stock markets of the world, though many exchanges did manage to close off their lows. Here in the US the problem was that S&P issued an opinion on US debt that threatened to cut its triple-A rating if something weren’t done by 2013 to rein in deficits. How much of…
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…