Categories: software

VMware’s ‘West Coast Offense’

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on January 12

VMware’s purchase of Yahoo’s Zimbra e-mail software shows how VMware, under a management team led by former Microsoft executives, continues to diversify in the face of competition from their former…

Ellison’s Impatience Over Sun

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on September 22

Toward the end of Larry Ellison’s freewheeling talk in San Jose on Sept. 21, host Ed Zander got into a spat with a fellow in the back of the room…

Apres Mint, Intuit Must Freshen its Brands

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on September 16

Now that it’s bought Mint.com to spruce up its personal finance software, Intuit needs to protect a place in the market for its aging Quicken brand. It’s got to do…

Clearing the Clouds from VMware’s Road Map

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on August 31

VMware eased into its annual conference in San Francisco on Aug. 31 with a few small announcements about cost savings and industry partnerships. The spotlight now turns to Chief Executive…

Microsoft’s Patent Dust-Ups

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on August 19

For the past half dozen years, Microsoft has been busily getting its patent house in order. In a bid to protect itself against lawsuits alleging that it has infringed on…

VMware Acquires SpringSource to get Stickier

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on August 10

VMware took a big step today toward making its software less replaceable in corporate data centers. The company, which makes virtualization software that lets businesses run servers more efficiently, spent…

Google’s Chrome Operating System: We’ve Got It All Wrong

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 11

“A real rival to Windows.” “Google drops a nuclear bomb on Microsoft.” It all sounds so dramatic and exciting, the kind of story we journalists love. But I can’t help…

Microsoft’s Ozzie Says Cloud Services Will Yield Lower Margins

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on June 05

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, caused quite a splash June 4 when he told the audience at an event in Silicon Valley that cloud computing will probably lower Microsoft’s…

Oracle’s Bold Java Plans

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on June 02

Larry Ellison has never been shy about nudging Oracle into new parts of the software market. The database king has spent $40 billion to build a franchise in business applications,…

Ballmer Says Venture Freeze Will Spare Startups in Key Fields

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on May 06

The pullback in business spending and venture capital investing will winnow the field of startups, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in an May 6 speech at Stanford University. But “there’s really…

Oracle and VMware: Rising Competition?

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on April 22

VMware pulled out the stops for the launch of its latest software Apr. 21. Executives at the Silicon Valley company shared a stage at an outdoor theater with Cisco Systems…

Oracle: Spending Money to Make It

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on March 23

Coming off a quarter in which higher product support sales drove surprisingly strong profits, Oracle tacked on an acquisition Mar. 23 that could broaden the market for those contracts. Oracle…

Mathematica Made Affordable

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on February 05

When is a $300 software package a bargain? When it would otherwise be a $2,500 application. Wolfram Research’s Mathematica has long be legendary among folks who use serious mathematics both…

Google Earth’s Deep Dive

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on February 02

Google trotted out some eclectic star power Feb. 2 to show a new version of Google Earth that spotlights the world’s oceans. At an event at the California Academy of…

A Look at Adobe CS4

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on January 19

The price of software, at least according to the conventional wisdom, is rapidly tending toward zero. That may well be true for consumer applications and even some standard business programs,…

Google I/O: Window Into the Real Future of the Web

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 28

Google’s Web-based applications such as Gmail and Google Docs often look to casual observers like a tiny sideshow to the company’s main event, which overwhelmingly remains search. Some folks even…

Prime Time for Google Apps

Posted by: Rob Hof on October 02

Starting Oct. 3, companies using Google Apps Premier Edition, the for-pay version of Google’s suite of online office-productivity applications, will see a new button to add security and compliance services…

Google Apps Go Corporate

Posted by: Rob Hof on February 22

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the launch of a for-pay version of Google Apps for Your Domain was nigh. Now, it’s here. And Premier Edition, a package of…

Google Apps: More Than Meets the Eye?

Posted by: Rob Hof on February 02

It looks like Google Apps for Your Domain soon will come outta beta with a paid version for enterprises. The one thing I wanted to explore in the story I…

Google’s “Not Office” Launches

Posted by: Rob Hof on October 11

Google has just launched “Docs & Spreadsheets,” notes TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, one of the bloggers who got an early look. Yeah, yeah, they’re not trying to do an online version…

Google Vs. Microsoft, For Real

Posted by: Rob Hof on August 27

So Google’s moving forcefully at last into the business software market, at least in a test version. Google Apps for Your Domain, will let small businesses, nonprofits, and universities use,…

A big shift coming for mobile applications

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 26

New uses for smart phones seem to be popping out of the woodwork. I know this because my 18-year-old son, Daniel, is one of zillions of teen-agers who are lining…

How to break Microsoft’s lock on applications

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 26

Lock in. It’s the enemy of the corporate or government IT manager. Everybody wants to have alternatives so they’re not dependent on a single tech supplier for a crucial set…

Aging Software: Watch Yourself Grow (Older)

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 17

Scotland’s government health officials have created new software allowing people to see what they will look like when they grow older. Check it out, it’s fun!

Sidebar Wars

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 12

I saw “sidebar” demonstrations from Yahoo and Microsoft this week, and this is shaping up to be the new battleground for the hearts and minds of the Net-surfing public. For…

The Hunt for Software Pirates

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 08

A couple of days ago, I got a message on my home computer purporting to be from Microsoft telling me it wanted permission to download some software onto my…

Microsoft and SAP make sweet music together

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 02

Back in late 2003, Microsoft secretly approached SAP to discuss the potential of a merger that would have been by far the largest coupling in software industry history. After months…

CA’s new M&A strategy revealed

Posted by: Steve Hamm on April 24

When Jeff Clarke left software maker CA last week to run Cendant’s travel businesses, the person who replaced him as chief operating officer brought with him a long resume of…

Abolish Software Patents? Not So Simple

Posted by: Rob Hof on April 14

VC Brad Feld thinks software patents should be abolished because they stunt innovation: If we continue on the path we are on, patents will continue to increase in their overall…

Yuchun Lee’s big scores

Posted by: Steve Hamm on March 24

Yuchun Lee won’t say how much money he made as a member of the club of MIT-related brainiacs who regularly make killings at America’s casinos. “It’s good money,” is his…

Surf’s Up

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 09

Pat Sueltz has made a study of the tech industry—from the inside. First she spent 20 years at IBM, where she guided CEO Louis Gerstner to the Internet and then…

Best-of-Breed Software Lives!

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 03

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has been the high priest of consolidation in the software industry. His pitch: customers want a few large software makers that offer them a wide…

Why Microsoft shouldn’t buy Siebel

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 27

During our internal BW discussions over the past few months about who would buy wounded Siebel Systems, I always considered Oracle the most likely acquirer—but saw Microsoft as a darkhorse….

An Eye on i2

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on October 26

Now that Oracle has taken Siebel out of the race, my favorite dark horse to prove whether best-of-breed software can make a comeback is i2 Technologies. Hey! Stop laughing! I’m…

Those reinvention blues

Posted by: Steve Hamm on August 19

One of the most difficult things for a tech company to accomplish is a complete makeover. They spend years convincing customers, the press, and analysts that they’re one thing—then…

Euro software patent law crushed

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 06

Well, they’re back to Square One with European software patents. The European Parliament on July 6 voted 648 to 32 against a bill that would have unified European practices and…

More about software patents

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 01

I sure got knocked around by TechBeat readers for my pro-patent posting last week. Thirty people say I’m an idiot. The folks at Red Hat, the leading distributor of Linux…

Showdown over European Software Patents

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 24

Get ready for yet another battle in the European Parliament cloakrooms over the future of software patent law. Back on June 22, the parliament’s legal affairs committee voted to allow…

Splunk It

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 03

I remember when the Google boys came to visit BW the first time, hopped up on ideas, pitching a new way to search the Web. Boy were they right. The…

Open Source: Capitalist Tool?

Posted by: Rob Hof on June 01

That’s the opinion, anyway, of Jesús Villasante, head of software technologies at the European Community’s Information Society and Media Directorate General. According to a story on ZDNet Australia, Villasante accused…

Liquid Software

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 27

Paul Wahl has done his bit for Solid Software. He was COO of Siebel Systems from 99 to 03, and had worked at SAP for seven years, including being CEO…

Call it I-Robotware

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 19

Continuing on my robot theme… Canadian tech entrepreneur Nelson Lin has at long last accomplished a goal he set for himself more than 20 years ago. His tiny, seven-person RoboCoder…

When will software companies grow up?

Posted by: Rob Hof on January 13

Another day, another story that a newly installed software program doesn’t work. Except this time, it’s not just a glitch in some company’s supply chain software but a critical new…