Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO and the industry’s favorite pariah, expects to get fired any minute now.
He expects to get fired because he’s adamantly opposed to winding SCO down, laying off its people and settling the company’s litigation against Novell and IBM for chump change, whic...Oct. 16, 2009 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,525
You have, perhaps, heard about the failure of the T-Mobile USA Sidekick smartphone – known for its remote data storage and the fact that (gad!) Paris Hilton is a devotee – and how Microsoft’s $500 million 2008 Danger acquisition, which invented the thing, managed to permanently lose wh...
Acer has come from behind to knock Dell off its perch as the second-largest PC vendor in the world, and Dell is still hurting from its loss to HP which claimed Dell’s old No. 1 title three years ago.
Acer president Gianfranco Lanci just predicted Tuesday that Acer would dethrone De...
You may have heard about the failure of the T-Mobile USA Sidekick smartphone– known for its remote data storage and the fact that (gad!) Paris Hilton is a devotee – and how Microsoft’s $500 million 2008 Danger acquisition, which invented the thing, managed to lose what looked for a whi...
Rentokil Initial, an odd combination of a modern-day charwoman who in her off-hours is a courier service, exterminator, insurance adjuster, heating and air conditioning installer and water and electrical tester, has gone with Google Apps, expecting to be the largest deployment of its p...
Cisco, which just plunked down $3 billion to buy Tandberg ASA, makers of videoconferencing gear, said Tuesday morning that it’s going to buy nine-year-old Starent Networks for $2.9 billion, a 21% premium.
Starent supplies mobile and converged carriers with IP-based mobile infrastru...
Avaya, the telecommunications outfit spun out of Lucent in 2000 and taken private by Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital for $8.2 billion in 2007, the company that’s buying Nortel’s Enterprise Division for $900 million, a move that will recombine Northern Electric and Western Electric...
Twitter is supposedly talking to Microsoft and Google – no, silly, in two separate rooms – about data mining. Twitter wants to sell a full feed from its service that could be integrated into the results of their search engines. Twitter is now up to 54 million monthly users. Reportedly ...
Dell will close its four-year-old 750,000-square-foot North Carolina desktop PC plant by January to help it trim $4 billion from its annual nut. The closure of its last factory in North America will cost 905 jobs. It still has to dicker with state and local governments over the $240 mi...
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hails from a culture born to pay retail. Remember Sun paid $2 billion for Cobalt Networks and might as well have lit cigars with the money, a billion for MySQL and $4.1 billion for StorageTek. So it’s no surprise to read on CNET that he thinks he paid a billion ...
AT&T is reportedly going to offer a Dell Android-based smartphone to U.S customers of its cellphone network next year, according to an unconfirmed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters says the thing will be a version of the Marvell Technology-designed oPhone “prototype” Dell showe...
Rackspace has launched an evangelical site called NoMoreServers.com dedicated to the emergence of what it calls Computing-as-a-Service models like hosting, cloud computing and SaaS to power corporate computing. And it’s hired hosting industry strategist Andrew Schroepfer to do the miss...
IBM says it’s putting Notes and Domino collaboration software on mobile and web-connected devices such as the iPhone, Nokia smartphones, thin clients, laptops and desktops used to access corporate applications and business processes. In search of market share it will make Domino Design...
Engine Yard, the Ruby-on-Rails automation and management start-up, has raised $19 million in third-round financing, pushing it total funding over $37 million. Investors included Amazon, DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, Presidio Ventures (which is really Sumitomo), Benchmark Capital and New ...
MuleSoft, the web middleware concern, has released Tcat Server 6 R1, an enterprise-class web application server based on Apache Tomcat that now includes cloud deployment capabilities enabled in one click by a plug-in for Amazon EC2. Administrators can manage their server instances both...
Parallels, which thinks of itself as a cloud enabler, has joined the bare metal hypervisor business with a little number called Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal that leverages its desktop hypervisor and gussies it up to make it good at stuff like test and development and consolidating mul...
Red Hat said Wednesday that its KVM hypervisor, its pet virtualization scheme, can talk to Microsoft’s Windows Server and that customers can now deploy jointly supported server virtualization environments that combine Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The two companie...
After 10 years of trench warfare and a body count of close to $1.8 billion in fines, the European Commission is getting ready to pass Microsoft the roach of concord and close the book on the case. The EC said Wednesday that a final settlement of the browser issue, Europe’s updated vers...
MySQL’s good-looking and now rich former CEO Marten Mickos asked the European Commission Thursday to rubberstamp Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which is supposedly held up by EC concerns over MySQL’s destiny at the hands of Oracle. Mickos said in a letter to EC antitrust czarina Neelie K...
Gee and it was only four o’clock
yesterday morning Microsoft time that Microsoft’s
general counsel Brad Smith remarked that antitrust
regulators might try targeting somebody else besides
Microsoft for a change.
Like, oh, say, maybe, IBM for its $5 trillion 100%
mainframe...
Eolas Technologies, whose overarching browser patent claims struck fear in the heart of World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and left Microsoft, a test case for the industry, significantly poorer, filed a massive patent infringement suit in the infamous Eastern District of Texas this...
Adobe is nosing its flagship ColdFusion rapid web site and Internet application development platform onto multiple clouds. Turns out it's been quietly collaborating with Alagad, a North Carolina web development services provider, on a cloud implementation of ColdFusion 9. Adobe just re...
Having just gone into competition with Google’s Gmail Monday, IBM said Tuesday that it’s going to take on Amazon’s S3 storage cloud and anybody else in the storage cloud business by launching its own Smart Business Storage Cloud along with a so-called Information Archive. As with its d...
In a fit of Google-envy, IBM Monday went into competition with Gmail, pitching businesses big and small on LotusLive iNotes, a new cloud-based hybrid e-mail service that starts at three buck a head a month. It claims its cloud-mail is secure and reliable – Gmail has had some problems l...
Citrix started opening the kimono on XenDesktop 4 Monday claiming it’s the complete answer to desktop virtualization and will revolutionize desktop computing for hundreds of millions of corporate users. Judging from the pilots going into production and 40,000- to 125,000-seat deploymen...
Much, much smaller Cisco rival Brocade Communications Systems, which has gotten a lot more popular with OEMs like IBM and Dell since Cisco went into the server business, is supposedly thinking selling itself off, or so said an unconfirmed piece in the Wall Street Journal Monday. The pa...
In the unlikely event that Novell and IBM harbored any hope that the trustee set over SCO would abandon its litigation, that hope has been dashed. SCO last Thursday sent in its brief opposing Novell’s bid for a rare en banc rehearing of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision overt...
Google Wave, the amorphous open source widgetry that Google has trouble explaining but contends – silly Google – will replace e-mail, the most viral application ever, started moving into a wider test group of some 100,000 users Wednesday ahead of a still wider release in December. It’s...
Craig Conway, the guy who got bounced out of PeopleSoft in the middle of its prolonged and eventually hopeless fight to stop Oracle from taking it over, has been named to AMD’s board. Conway has a talent for rebuilding companies but as president and CEO of PeopleSoft, the PeopleSoft bo...
Microsoft unveiled its new $550 million, partially container-based, 700,000-square-foot cloud data center in a warehouse somewhere around Chicago Wednesday. Each container, stacked two high, reportedly contains about 1,800–2,500 servers with room enough for 112 containers. The place, s...
Oracle says it’s going to acquire certain assets of HyperRoll, a developer of financial reporting acceleration software in Mountain View, California. HyperRoll’s software analyzes large quantities of financial data. Its customer base is largely retail and financial accounts. Oracle sai...
Salesforce has invested in a joint venture that will deliver finance and accounting applications in the cloud. Its partner is Dutch-base Unit 4 Agresso, parent company of financial ISV CODA. The new company is called FinancialForce. Nobody said how much either is throwing in, but Sales...
A Rhode Island district court judge Tuesday struck down a jury verdict ordering Microsoft to pay an obscure Australian developer by the name of Ric Richardson $388 million, reportedly the fifth-largest patent infringement award in history. In a relatively rare and painstaking post-tria...
Not content with running off some Sun customers and piggybacking on Sun resellers, HP has plucked Randy Seidl, the senior vice-president of Sun’s North America region global sales and services organization, out of there and made him head of Americas sales for its Enterprise Storage, Se...
HP is close to moving its printer unit into its PC unit according to an unconfirmed, unattributed piece in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, which would mean redoing what CEO Mark Hurd undid when he got there to shake the Carly dust off the company.
The reorg reportedly just needs Hur...
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), the group of Microsoft foes that has been hounding the company for years with complaints to the European Commission, and Opera, one of its members, are griping that the proposed ballot screen solution to the EC’s charge that Micr...
Recursion Software is about to say that it’s ported its high-performance C++ Toolkit to five of the most popular mobile operating systems so programmers can finally write a single app that can run on any phone using those systems with virtually no modifications.
The Symbian release ...
Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s open source defector, whose imminent departure from the company became widely known when Microsoft set up its own CodePlex open source foundation a few weeks ago, has turned up at five-year-old cloud start-up Sonoa Systems, where he will head product strategy and...
Kickfire, the data warehouse start-up with its very own parallel-processing SQL chip – and the first low-end data warehouse play ever – has beefed up its MySQL Enterprise-based appliance so it’ll stretch to systems that are 5TB. Back in the spring when it started rolling its widgets ou...
Remember that ad Oracle ran a few weeks ago on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and later on the back cover of the Economist and repeated on its web site claiming "Sun + Oracle is Faster" than IBM? Oracle's claim for an undefined Oracle-Sun box was supposedly based on TPC-C re...
