Tech Buzz

Climbing to the top of the charts last week was a book titled, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. The stated purpose of this book is to showcase how politics in Washington turned a presidency that started as revolutionary into one that was a disaster. I...

OK, this may seem like a huge stretch because I doubt there are any tech companies more different than EMC and Apple. However, I just spent several days at EMC World and I actually found one similarity: Both companies are focused like lasers on customer loyalty. This goes beyond customer satisfactio...

I remember being at the 2000 Democratic National Convention and watching Joe Lieberman give his speech accepting the nomination as Al Gore's running mate. Contrasted with the opposing lines of bandana-faced protesters and riot-geared officers, his speech left me hopeful and uplifted. I recall I felt...

It's heartening to see that Mark Zuckerberg is following my advice and seeking a sit-down with Google to hammer out their differences over this Friend Connect thing. It would be heartening as well to see Facebook coming to the defense of my private data as forcefully as it has been -- if only it act...

I used to run a post-merger clean-up team for IBM years ago, and have since spent a great deal of time thinking about and dealing with major mergers that clients have undertaken. In a market like this, consolidation and acquisition are inevitable, and knowing how to play in what will likely be the k...

I'm often fascinated by mergers, or I should say I'm fascinated by how often they are attempted and how rarely they succeed. While it may appear that smaller mergers are more successful than larger ones, the reality is smaller merger failures are vastly easier to cover up. Very few mergers actually ...

I'm writing this from the Microsoft Management Summit at Interop with 5,000 of my closest friends in Las Vegas, and I'm still thinking about the book I brought up recently, titled Inside Steve's Brain. The result is, I think I've had an epiphany -- and no, I didn't call a doctor. I realized that for...

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a murder case to go forward if a body has not been found. It is even rarer for the charge to be first-degree murder -- and less common still for the defendant to be found guilty. Those were the exact circumstances, though, under which Hans Reiser was convicted ...

Microsoft has just brought out the physical representation of its fifth major evolutionary change, and this one may turn out to be the most dramatic. The technology, Live Mesh, may actually both help Microsoft's customer satisfaction issues and help move Apple and Linux onto desktops everyplace. Spe...

Costco and Sam's Club are rationing rice. Friday's reported incident in the Persian Gulf probably has more than a few paranoid individuals stocking up on gasoline. And to top it all off, Microsoft's cutoff date for Windows XP is coming in two months, a decision that's left over 165,000 fans of the ...