Thursday, June 11, 2009
Sun to Oracle Customers: Reduce Costs and Eliminate Vendor Lock-In! Oh…Wait…
To hear tell from Sun executives, the company’s impending acquisition by Oracle will be of great benefit to Sun, its technology and its customers. “Is this Oracle thing a good thing for Java?” Sun chairman Scott McNealy asked last week at the company’s JavaOne conference. “And is it a…good thing for the community, and all the rest of it?…It’s absolutely a good thing.” Thing is, this wasn’t always Sun’s opinion. In fact, the company’s touting of the benefits of the Oracle acquisition is, dare I say, a tad ironic given its preacquisition opinion of Oracle’s prices.
2009 is proving to be a year of dubious distinction for Microsoft in patent litigation. On Wednesday the company was ordered to pay $200 million to Toronto-based i4i for willfully infringing its patents. 
One of the simplest ways to create a shortage, and the buying frenzy that typically accompanies it, is to announce that there will be one. And this is precisely what Sprint CEO Dan Hesse did for the Palm Pre Tuesday. Speaking at J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference shortly after Sprint announced the handset’s street date, Hesse said he anticipates that supplies will be limited, at least initially. 
After three years, AMD is finally getting around to merging it’s microprocessor and graphics divisions, another stab at reaching profitability after more than two years of losses. On Wednesday afternoon the company said it would consolidate the two divisions into one–platforms and products–led by SVP Rick Bergman.
Global information technology spending will fare worse in 2009 than it did during the dotcom bust of 2001. That’s the grim news from Gartner, which Tuesday predicted that worldwide IT spending will slip to $3.2 trillion this year from $3.4 trillion in 2008. If that should happen, the drop will be the greatest decline in IT spending in nearly a decade.
Looks like Microsoft just lost the sole advantage its CEO Steve Ballmer claimed it had over Google in search: the ability to experiment. The search sovereign made two changes to its search results pages Tuesday that it says will produce better results for complicated searches.
Cisco has finally crossed the Rubicon. Long a partner to the big server makers, the networking equipment giant today became a competitor, announcing an aggressive push into the server market. No longer content to peddle switches and routers alone, Cisco is now selling a full-blown data center solution.
Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, made headlines last year when he switched the District’s 38,000 employees from Microsoft Office to Google’s Web-based office suite. He may soon do the same to the White House as well, now that he’s been tapped as the nation’s first chief information officer.
Now that Sony’s old guard has taken what was once a strong electronics and gaming brand and run it into the ground, the company’s new guard is circling back to resurrect it. This morning the company announced a management overhaul that will see CEO Howard Stringer succeed Ryoji Chubachi as president and assume responsibility for Sony’s key electronics division.
“What has become of the Sony known for its technology?” Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister and former Sony employee Akira Amari asked in October of 2006. “I hope it will solve its problems soon to quickly recover its brand image reputed for technological prowess.” If Amari can recall when that was Sony’s image, he has a good memory. Because Sony lost its dominant position in consumer electronics to rivals in Japan, South Korea and the U.S. long ago and has yet to regain it. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the the company’s videogame division.
