Tech Buzz

Last week, history was made. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were physically on stage together -- for just the second time ever -- in what many have described as something of a love fest, with Bill repeatedly praising the Mac. Kind of makes you wonder what the two of them could have done as close partners...

The PS3 hasn't been doing well. It has been getting thrashed by the Xbox 360 and the Wii. To add insult to injury, even the PS2 has outsold it -- and it's obsolete. It now looks like Sony is executing a comeback plan, and that the PS3 may be looking interesting again. The Microsoft patent thing tha...

Despite their denials, newspapers all over the world are simply dying. The gravity of the problem is not the result of competition from TV or the Internet. Rather, it's due to the fact that people all over the world prefer moving pictures in the palms of their hands over deciphering or reading betwe...

Last week was busy: Microsoft supposedly threatened open source with patent infringement, and it supposedly said Linux was dead. If that didn't piss off enough people, Engadget falsely reported delays for Leopard and the iPhone, trashing Apple's stock, and if there was anyone in tech not pissed off...

Observers of recent legislative action in Sacramento should be forgiven for thinking they have been transported back to 2002, when policy makers were pushing government mandated software standards and micromanagement of cell phone companies. Five years later, in 2007, the same bad policies are bein...

Do we still need venture capitalists in the software industry? Sounds like a no-brainer, but the question also reflects the disruption that is taking place in enterprise software -- initiated by Salesforce.com and accelerated with its unveiling of a company incubator in San Mateo, Calif. For the re...

Looking back at last week, I had a lot to choose from, but the two things that I thought were the most interesting were Sony's dropping the PSP price to a very attractive $169, and the resignation of PC World's editor in chief over a throwaway Apple piece. The first item got me thinking about why th...

Is there a hybrid approach to e-mail messaging that allows you to choose the best from both the open standards community and your legacy proprietary systems technology? An emphatic yes! Today a majority of enterprises work in a Microsoft Exchange environment. Microsoft has been able to monopolize th...

A mind map combines both the power of a picture with the suggestion of words. You may have seen mind maps, but you may not have known the name for them. Sometimes they look like clusters of bubbles; other times, like elaborate tree structures. Because mind mapping has been connected with business br...

As Red Hat and its JBoss unit ramp up their SOA (service-oriented architectures) offerings and capabilities, they are re-emerging as a powerful mischief-maker to the established commercial vendors -- this time on the subject of data lifecycle in the age of SOA. However, there soon could be much more...