Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave his latest performance to the faithful and a few items stood out. He was in good form as usual, and his friends from Google, including CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin, as well as Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (YouTube founders), were in the front rows watching the master.
Here’s […]
VMware said Tuesday that it has acquired application virtualization company Thinstall in a move that will broaden the company’s desktop capabilities.
Privately held Thinstall delivers application virtualization to the desktop and doesn’t require preinstalled software and deployment infrastructure. What’s curious about the deal is that Thinstall is a partner with Citrix, which is increasingly becoming a […]
Updated: Sun Microsystems is taking the plunge into the database market with the purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion ($800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assumption of approximately $200 million in options).
With the move, announced Wednesday, Sun takes a big leap into the $15 billion database […]
The clumsy courtship between Oracle and BEA Systems is over. Oracle said Wednesday that it will acquire BEA for $19.375 a share in cash.
The offer puts the value of BEA at roughly $8.5 billion.
On a conference call–where Oracle wasn’t taking questions–Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the deal will offer “greater value to our customers than […]
Cowen & Co. outlined its top 10 potential technology surprises for 2008 and a slowdown in software as a services is front and center on the list. There are also a few wild-cards such as Google Apps adoption and AMD giving up on the market share war.
Cowen ranked its surprises based on events most likely […]
IBM was so happy with its fourth quarter results that it couldn’t wait three days to report them.
On Monday, IBM (all resources) released its preliminary fourth quarter results. The company is expected to release its official results on Thursday.
Big Blue said it expects earnings of $2.80 a share from continuing operations for the quarter ended […]
Guest post: Chris Matyszczyk follows on my review of Nick Carr’s new book with the saga of his own trying exegesis of the text.
“You’re obsessed with sex,” said my ZDNet handler, looking angrier than a caucuser who had just switched his vote from Chris Dodd to Hillary.
“But sex gets page views. And you […]
Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has named chief operating officer John Lilly as CEO. Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman.
The duo outlined the move in separate blogs. For her part, Baker said on her blog that she will focus on issues like standards, interoperability and data management. Specifically, she wants […]
Customer relationship management software, particularly from Salesforce.com, has come the closest to being an “anywhere application,” but other enterprise tools still need work, according to a report by the Yankee Group.
Even though anywhere enterprise applications need work, technology managers need to prepare for them even though most executives don’t deem this software “absolutely critical” for […]
When former Delta Airlines chief operating officer James Whitehurst takes over as CEO of Red Hat on New Year’s Day he’ll face the worst kind of doubters–the quiet ones. But Whitehurst could very well take Red Hat to the next level.
Aside from the blogosphere (Techmeme), you won’t hear much questioning about the choice of Whitehurst. […]
One of the big takeaways from IBM’s powwow over collaboration tools was that Web 2.0 technology is easing its way into the enterprise.
First, companies like IBM and Cisco will adopt mashups that combine enterprise applications with external applications. Then CIOs will slowly adopt Web 2.0 approaches. These executives will experiment from the inside out. First, […]
Adobe has contributed its virtual machine to Mozilla’s Tamarin project.
Under the arrangement, Adobe will contribute source code from its ActionScript Virtual Machine, which uses the scripting language engine in FlashPlayer 9.
The virtual machine, now known as Tamarin, will be hosted by Mozilla, which said it will use the code in its “next-generation of […]
Red Hat on Thursday named former Delta Airlines executive James Whitehurst CEO effective Jan. 1. Current chief Matthew Szulik continues as chairman.
Whitehurst was most recently the chief operating officer at Delta Airlines and helped navigate the airline’s bankruptcy restructuring. Whitehurst joined Delta in 2002. In a statement, Red Hat said Whitehurst will bring “a combination […]
Oracle on Thursday reported fiscal second quarter net income of $1.3 billion, or 25 cents a share, on revenue of $5.3 billion, up 28 percent from a year ago. Excluding charges, Oracle earned 31 cents a share to handily top Wall Street estimates.
According to Thomson Financial Oracle was expected to report earnings of 27 cents […]
Dell is adding Ubuntu 7.10, also known as Gutsy Gibbon, to its consumer Linux lineup in the U.S. The company has also expanded its Linux offerings abroad.
First, the Ubuntu 7.10 announcement. Dell on its blog Tuesday said that Ubuntu 7.0 will be preinstalled on the Inspiron 530 and Inspiron 1420. Ubuntu 7.10 will also be […]
Demand for NetSuite’s IPO is running higher than expected.
In an SEC filing on Tuesday, NetSuite said it is raising the price range of its IPO to $16 to $19 a share. The stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “N.”
The previous price range was $13 to $16 a share.
NetSuite is […]
Our engineering team put ZDNet blogs through a cloud tag blender to render a weighted list of top topics for 2008. In an age when the consumer and enterprise worlds are colliding (but no exploding), Google, iPhone, Apple and Microsoft captured the big buzz of the year in our blogs. It was also a year […]
IBM has embraced Linux as its operating system of choice, but employees are
slowly working toward using it on the desktop.
As of yesterday, IBM had 24,190 Linux desktop installations within the company.
That’s out of 372,000 IBMers.
So what’s the holdup? John Walicki, open client architect at IBM, says it’s a matter
of application maturity. As Lotus Notes develops […]
Adobe on Monday reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings and revenue that topped expectations due to strong Creative Suite 3 demand. The company also upped its outlook for the first quarter.
For the quarter ended Nov. 30, Adobe reported fourth quarter revenue of $911.2 million, up 36 percent from $682.2 million a year ago and well ahead […]
Updated below: There’s a good discussion on the line between journalism and blogging, but it’s also worth noting the technology gulf between media companies and their content minions.
In Scott Karp’s overall discussion asking whether blogs can do journalism–I think it’s all the same and chances are techies don’t care anyway–he touches on blogs partially […]
Amazon has announced the limited beta of its SimpleDB, a database Web service designed to ride shotgun with Amazon’s S3 storage service and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Amazon’s Simple DB provides real-time lookup and querying of structured data, which will presumably be stored on the S3 service. According to Amazon customers will save money because they […]
Google has launched a tool called Knol, which is a service that aggregates knowledge from individuals.
Google says:
The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily […]
Novell reported its fourth quarter results and its Linux business continues to post strong growth. However, the growth characteristics are changing. What used to be Microsoft-fueled growth–courtesy of an interoperability and cross-selling arrangement–is now broadening via other partnerships with companies like SAP, Dell and Lenovo.
Putting a hard number on what was dubbed a Microsoft halo […]
Adobe on Thursday said it will open source a data access technology called BlazeDS. The goal: Speed up the adoption of enterprise rich Internet applications.
BlazeDS connects data, which can be housed in the enterprise or pushed out, to Adobe Flex and AIR applications. Adobe says the data access technologies were previously available as part of […]