Tech Buzz

With the December announcement that NDS, a provider of technology solutions for digital pay-TV, acquired Jungo, a residential gateway software provider, we're continuing to witness consolidation in the market to deliver complete end-to-end access and service-provider solutions. The purchase also rea...

As Vista launches, I'm in New York thinking back to 1995 when I was attending the Windows 95 launch and imagining what could have been. 1995 was an amazing year. From day one, people were excited about Windows. I remember meeting with Apple and suggesting it really needed to step up its game -- only...

The appendage of the letter "i" to a word with the intent of creating an icon is silly. Momentary, short-term fame and glory may be possible, but it is a very dubious tactic for creating a long-lasting, global iconic mark. What makes an icon is the exclusive longevity of its unique name. That's why ...

In Part 1 of this series, I talked a bit about how COBOL is everywhere. From telephones to credit cards to supermarket checkouts to ATMs -- sometime during the day, just about everyone touches COBOL. They don't see it directly, but drivers don't see under the hood while they're driving either. COBOL...

I had meetings last week with each of the big three on-demand CRM vendors -- Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite -- and made some observations. Sometimes I get complaints from some of them when I mention more than one in an article because they like to pretend that they are unique. My grudging con...

Apple released its financials last week, and 2006 was a very, very good year for the company. However, its forecast suggests that 2007 may be starting out as one of Apple's worst years this decade. Vista is now within two weeks of launching. I've been using it for some weeks now, and there are some...

It's no secret that Linux at the server level is growing fast in the business world. It's stable, it's infinitely customizable, it has the kind of support that an enterprise demands and its return on investment is amazing to people more accustomed to the costs of other approaches. So, you find it ev...

Economics teaches that the market for some goods and services are "natural" monopolies. Take telephone service, for example. A telephone service is only really valuable if any person with a phone can be connected to any other person with a phone. For this reason, the market will "naturally" coalesce...

Macworld vs. CES was a huge mismatch; even if you took Microsoft out of the mix, this was more like an ant against a dragon than even Jack against a giant, and -- drum roll, please -- the ant won. By the end of Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld, the media had lost interest in CES, and reporters focus...

Late last year, a congressional committee began examining the idea of taxing property inside digital worlds such as Second Life. If that happens, a digital Boston Tea Party should break out, perhaps making it the only place in America where a real revolution could still happen. Over the holidays, an...