Tech Buzz

What a nut I was. Back when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced they would be joining forces on interoperability between Sun, nee Java, and .NET -- remember Steve Ballmer of "Ballmer and Butthead" fam] and Scott McNealy sitting side by side -- I thought they meant it. I pushed the envelope, jus...

Google's recent announcement that it is creating a home for personal health records online is a natural outgrowth of Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 consumer Internet focus. The question this raises is whether a market-driven system is better for keeping health records than one run by the government. Grou...

I've been talking about heroes for several weeks now, most recently the folks at HP who are overcoming the company's internal bureaucracy to turn what had been a problem unit -- its PC unit -- into the most powerful PC entity in the world. But inside HP another group of unsung heroes are those that ...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

Last week, HP turned in a financial report that seemed to provide a strong counterpoint to the view that the world was heading into a recession, or at least that tech was going to be sacrificed to that recession. However, this took me back to IBM and what stopped its turnaround in the '90s and wheth...

This week marked the anniversary of the announcement that the satellite radio firms Sirius and XM plan to merge, yet so far the companies have not been allowed to consummate the marriage. That's because regulators are standing in the way, backed by well-heeled Washington lobbyists out to prove that ...

Last week continued the excitement with Yahoo as it worked to get Microsoft to increase its offer by trying out alternatives but not really finding any good ones. At the huge phone conference in Spain -- where Apple wasn't -- companies from Microsoft to Google announced acquisitions and plans that s...

Handset makers are gathering in Barcelona this week for the Mobile World Congress, a conference where the market's biggest players show you why that top-dollar phone you picked up two weeks ago will be obsolete by Labor Day. Some of the biggest news coming out of the show focused on the multitude of...

Yahoo's board of directors has unanimously voted that Microsoft's unsolicited takeover bid is "not in the best interests" of the Web portal, a widely expected move that could put pressure on Redmond to beef up its $44.6 billion offer. Yahoo's board met over the weekend to consider the $31 per share ...

I've had a little time to think about the Yahoo/Microsoft merger, why this makes sense and what could go wrong. This thing actually should be one of the easiest mergers of its type, and there is actually a strange amount of affinity, often taken for granted, between these two firms that most seem to...