The cloud is in the news, in no small part because it’s earnings season and companies need to balance the need for publicity and the need to comply with SEC rules on “quiet periods”. Cloudiness is always a good way to get some positive ink. At any rate, we’re seeing three specific trends embodied in…
Cisco announced today that it would be “restructuring” its consumer business, dropping the Flip video line and focusing its home networking activities to gain better profits. The steps neither fix Cisco’s problems nor demonstrate with certainty that Cisco doesn’t know how to fix them, but they do seem to show that (dropping Flip notwithstanding) Cisco…
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…
The FCC, continuing on a relatively rare activist track, has ordered wireless operators to establish reasonable data roaming agreements among themselves, something that is seen as increasing wireless competition and thus potentially reducing retail rates. It’s also ordering utilities to simplify access to utility poles and conduits and to price usage fairly. The problem is…
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…
The international tensions of the week haven’t been ended; far from them in fact. Japan has raised its nuclear incident to a “5” on the international scale, between Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The UN, with both China and Russia abstaining, voted to approve any measures short of invasion in Libya, though at this point…
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 world’s markets continue to oscillate as speculation, risk, and policy questions all collide to generate uncertainty. I don’t think that the fundamentals are at risk, but there’s enough perception of problem to invite attempts to exploit uncertainty for profit. The nuclear situation in Japan and the aftermath of the earthquake are creating risk, and…
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…
The earthquake in Japan and the related threat of nuclear reactor problems are surely the headline items for today. The human scale of the disaster isn’t even known at this point, but many of even those who have survived uninjured face a difficult future. Homes, businesses, and infrastructure have been severely damaged, and the consequences…