Enterprise software

SAN FRANCISCO--When Salesforce.com CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff took the stage at the giant Moscone Center here today, 14,000 people, mostly customers, packed the auditorium to hear his two-hour keynote as he preached the social enterprise gospel and announced a bevy of new products and upgrades. He was speaking at the 13-year-old company's 10th Dreamforce conference, a four-day event that attracted an estimated 90,000 people.

Legendary rapper MC Hammer, who is also a tech angel investor, preceded Benioff on stage with a signature performance, surrounded by more than a dozen gyrating dancers. Benioff bounded on stage … Read more

Box, the cloud storage company that serves companies including LinkedIn, McAfee, and DirectTV, launched a service today that is suppose to make file transfers from the cloud up to 10 times faster.

The Box service lets businesses and individual consumers store their files in the cloud, much like competitors Dropbox and Google Drive. But Whitney Bouck, Box's general manager of enterprise, said that Box's new feature puts it ahead of other cloud offerings.

"We basically have the fastest cloud on the market," she said.

The new feature, called Box Accelerator, is a home-grown method for easing … Read more

For Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, business is more than creating disruptive technologies and changing business models. It's also about helping other people. He has been true to his word in donating $100 million to build a children's hospital in San Francisco, and the company's philanthropic arm has given more than $40 million in grants over the last 13 years.

But Benioff isn't all about helping other people. In a panel discussion prior to his interview at TechCrunch Disrupt with angel investor and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, the CEOs from Asana, Box … Read more

Microsoft and partner Attachments.me are trying to simplify the way Gmail users can use Microsoft's SkyDrive personal cloud-storage service.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced details of the partnership -- via which Google Gmail users can access SkyDrive files directly from their in-box, save e-mail attachments directly to SkyDrive, and share files directly from their SkyDrive. The new capabilities are provided via Attachment.me's Chrome extension.

What's happening behind the scenes enabling this scenario is an update to the SkyDrive software development kit (SDK). The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) that is similar to the file picker for Windows 8 apps … Read more

The federal judge in Oracle v. Google has given up on trying to find any more paid journalists, bloggers, and similar commentators in the case while also ordering Oracle to hand some money over to Google.

In a new order issued yesterday, Judge William Alsup said that the U.S. District Court of Northern California would "take no further action regarding the subject of payments by the litigants to commentators and journalists and reassures both sides that no commentary has in any way influenced the Court’s orders and ruling herein save and except for any treatise or article … Read more

Microsoft and Intel dominance will see serious erosion over the next few years in the era of the tablet and smartphone, market researcher IHS iSuppli said.

The Microsoft-Intel "Wintel" alliance will get slammed by the rise of the "new computer market," a category made up of PCs, smartphones, and media tablet segments, Craig Stice, an analyst at iSuppli, said in a research note today.

Waning Wintel influence is a common theme among analysts these days, as PC growth flattens and the popularity of PC proxies, like the iPad, surges.

Microsoft's share of the operating system … Read more

Microsoft and its partners have found an opening against Apple. That's rare these days.

The Windows 8 touch screen is the first real change that has come to Windows laptops in a long time.

I would put it right up there with the trackpad and, more recently, the MacBook Pro Retina display.

And it's made more significant by the fact that Apple has rejected the idea of a hybrid device via Tim Cook's refrigerator-toaster analogy. Which gives Apple's less-nimble Silicon Valley neighbor, Hewlett-Packard, a rare leg up.

Just check out HP's Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook. … Read more

Windows RT is not bowling over PC makers. What's not clear is whether this is just the usual startup snafus of a new platform or something more serious.

RT is new. It's the first mainstream Windows operating system to run on chips from companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. So, it's more vulnerable to glitches and gotchas and vendor skepticism.

That said, Hewlett-Packard does not appear to be showing any enthusiasm for the platform (yet), based on what I'm hearing from sources as well as empirical evidence (no HP Windows RT devices).

And Asian sources … Read more

Cloud openness, and what "open" means exactly in the context of cloud computing -- whether on-premise or in a public cloud--are hot topics at the CloudOpen conference, which is being held by the Linux Foundation in San Diego this week. CloudOpen is a new event being run in parallel with LinuxCon.

That those on stage and in the audience at this event favor openness is hardly news. Nor is the fact that an open cloud is a challenge that goes beyond open source. During a panel moderated by Red Hat's John Mark Walker, Greg DeKoenigsberg of Eucalyptus … Read more