The IT world has provided us with a number of interesting developments this week, starting with a Google suit filed over a proposed Department of the Interior messaging system award to Microsoft. Google feels that its own Apps could have been used for this, and that they should have been given the opportunity to demonstrate…
Economically speaking it would be hard to characterize last week as great, and yet it was better than expected and certainly better than many had feared. The critical number, the 3Q GDP, came in above last quarter’s level, and that pretty much laid the double-dip recession theory to rest. Far from showing wild swings of…
This week saw what’s become the usual push and pull of supply- and demand-side issues, and perhaps a bit more than the usual confusion in the markets (financial, enterprise, and consumer) about the net outcome. It’s not been the wild week of stock swings that could have happened had economic news been bad, but at…
Anyone who’s followed my writing knows that I’m no fan of the National Broadband Plan. My main issue is with the data that’s been presented to back that plan, and some recent work I’ve been doing is making me even more skeptical—if that’s possible. What started me off was a comment by a White House…
Speaking yesterday at BBWF, Alcatel-Lucent’s CMO Stephen Carter talked about the need for creating a “European approach” to 4G broadband. Some of the specific points in the talk weren’t new; we need to move beyond all-you-can-eat pricing, we need to add some specific partnership and settlement processes, and we need to recognize the intrinsic differences…
Juniper announced a mobile security suite, building on its Junos Pulse agent/client software that operates across a wide variety of mobile and PC platforms. The elements of the suite (the anti-virus, firewall, etc. that are common to most PC suites) are less news than the framework in which it’s being provided. What Juniper is doing…
Microsoft tech guru Ray Ozzie is leaving Microsoft, and in the wake of the announcement a memo from Ozzie was leaked to the media. In the memo, Ozzie asks Microsoft to confront an age without PCs, an age where traditional Microsoft PC incumbency would thus be meaningless. What Ozzie is looking at is whether appliances…
There’s a significant potential for some swings in stock prices this week (not that we haven’t seen them in the past!) because of the volume of economic news and the number of earnings reports due. The number that’s likely to be watched most closely is the 3Q GDP growth, which our model pegs at about…
Apple’s moves to converge its iOS and MacOS platforms over time and to create a unified developer environment between their disparate devices is a smart move that responds to the reality of the market and competitive environment. The question is how far they’ll go and what impact the efforts will have on the appliance space,…
The Facebook scandal, where popular application providers shared private data without user permission, is only the latest in a series of targeting-related breaches of privacy and violations of “policy”. The FTC has been of two minds regarding the issue, with some believing that regulation was necessary to protect consumers and others believing the industry could…