Strategy

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is betting on a mobile, cloud-based future and is winning.

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz bet big on that same future...with dramatically different results.

It's easy to suggest that the answer must be because Google employees are simply smarter than their counterparts at Sun, or that Schmidt is a rock-star CEO while Schwartz was not. But history belies such facile reasoning.

For one thing, there's no shortage of Sun employees at Google, including, most recently and notably, Tim Bray, who … Read more

Mozilla has made a name for itself by taking on Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser market, claiming as much as 30 percent of the global market with its open-source Firefox browser. Mozilla's second act, however, promises to be much more difficult, with increased competition from Microsoft but also from open-source competitors like Google Chrome.

What should Mozilla do next?

"More of the same" probably isn't going to cut it for the open-source foundation. Though Mozilla's progress is admirable (and, in some ways, amazing), it's also "an anomaly," as Mozilla executive Mitchell Baker has opined, … Read more

Good companies create new technology. Great companies integrate existing technology.

At least, that's how innovation happens today. Apple gets a lot of credit for its highly polished products, and rightly so. It may be, however, that Apple is simply the best at putting a pretty face on tightly integrated home-grown and open-source projects like FreeBSD (underpinning Mac OS X), Lucene (powering search on iTunes), and more.

That's innovation in the vendor community, but, as Gartner analyst Mark McDonald points out, it applies equally well for enterprise IT:

Does technology change the value of the IT professional?

Yes, as … Read more

If human progress can be measured by the number of blades we've managed to fit on a single razor, it's clear we have arrived on a massive scale. Both Gillette and Schick will shortly have a five-blade razor on the market.

Certainly it's progress of some kind, but whether its utility outweighs its cost is another question (and one that Wall Street Journal columnist Neal Templin answers in the negative). It also leaves plenty of room for a one-bladed, disruptive innovator to steal a march on the Gillette/Schick arms race, as Jeff Stibel argues in Harvard … Read more

At the inaugural Open Source Business Conference in 2004, the discussion centered on how to fund open source's survival. Just six years later, the OSBC conversation has taken a 180-degree shift to focus on whether proprietary software's shelf life is nearing its end as open-source software economics increasingly drive technology innovation.

What happened?

In a nutshell, the cost benefits of high-quality, free software came to outweigh the industry's former concerns about risks associated with "rebel code."

This trend, not visible in 2004, started with early adopters like Google. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst highlighted … Read more

Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.

That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open Web.

Traditionally, sync has been that thing you do between your desktop and your one mobile device to ensure that calendars, address books, and even browser bookmarks are current between the two islands of computing. But in … Read more

Pat Gelsinger, EMC's COO for Information Infrastructure Products, recently imparted a new vision for the future of IT to a group of analysts gathered in Hopkinton, Mass.

Gelsinger, who now manages some of the company's crown jewels like the storage products division and is EMC's executive sponsor for VMware, said EMC is out to change the structure, technology, and possibly the behavior of the IT community.

That's a tall order to fill even for someone as obviously energetic and experienced as Gelsinger, and so if you react to that statement with a measure of skepticism, you'… Read more

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher recently wrote an impassioned plea to turn off ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus to save the online publishing industry. His attempt to turn back the clock on digitization, however, would likely accomplish the opposite.

Fisher has a good point: ad-blocking software almost certainly does hurt sites like CNET by denying them revenue. As he points out, "[m]ost [large] sites...are paid on a per view basis," not a click-through basis, which means that ad-blocking software very literally takes money out of the pockets of publishers, leading consumers to "devastat[e]...the … Read more

Competition in the personal computer market is heating up, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish just what we mean when we talk about a PC. Airline flight attendants seem to be able to discern the difference between mobile phones and personal computers in their in-flight announcements, but the vendors who make and sell them increasingly can't.

It is precisely this fuzziness that offers Google and Apple a chance to get a leg up on Microsoft, but is also why Microsoft may be able to cement its lead.

Google is clear about its aims: it wants to get … Read more