David Needle

SAN FRANCISCO — The media sometimes simplifies the battle between tech behemoths Google and Microsoft in ways that are misleading. That was one of many biting assertions by two high-level Gartner analysts in a presentation here Wednesday at the company’s Gartner Symposium/Itxpo. Gartner analyst David Smith said press coverage often gives the impression that Google […]

SAN FRANCISCO –- Ready or not, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 (define) apps are finding their way onto corporate desktops, notebooks and smaller mobile computing devices. Users love these largely free applications so much that they’re bringing them into the enterprise — often without the knowledge or approval of management or IT staff. “It’s become […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pitched his company’s growing portfolio of infrastructure services as an alternative to traditional datacenter gear to attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo here. Bezos said a Web startup has to spend 70 percent of its energy on back-end considerations, such as buying servers and negotiating Internet service contracts. […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Mashups could be the next big technology push from IBM (Quote), and the company has internal deployments and customer engagements to prove it. Unlike Google (Quote) and others, though, IBM’s interest in mashups is primarily on the corporate side. The company demonstrated a Mashup Hub server application at the Web 2.0 conference here […]

The Internet’s in trouble. We’ve been hearing that for years. But although there have been glitches, the World Wide Web for the most part has been humming along just fine. But Deloitte Consulting thinks 2007 will be the year of some serious slowdowns in service. Deloitte raised some eyebrows at the beginning of the year […]

IBM released three new members of its BladeCenter family today with a focus on energy efficiency features. For the first time, IBM is also offering an optional modular 4 GB USB drive that uses Flash storage as an alternative to a traditional hard disk. The new offerings include the BladeCenter HS21 ($3,067 or $3,189, based […]

SAN FRANCISCO – To hear Google tell it, the person doing a search on a home PC is “the same guy” who uses search in the enterprise. Microsoft says that may be true, but that doesn’t mean they have the same needs. In a panel discussion here at the Gilbane content management conference, officials from […]

In the old secret agent spoof TV show Get Smart, agent Maxwell Smart would always ask his boss to use the Cone of Silence to ensure security. The running gag was it took forever for them to get in position and wait for the cone to be lowered, and then Smart would start talking about […]

Fewer than two months after Michael Dell resumed control of his company, things at headquarters are shifting again. Yesterday Dell (Quote) announced a new division focused on the needs of businesses operating “hyper-scale computing environments.” While Dell (Quote) is best known as a provider of computer products to the masses, the new Dell Data Center Solutions […]

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Blogs, RSS feeds, cool mashups (define) of disparate applications, Web 2.0 (define). These aren’t just buzzwords for the mainstream consumer Web, but technologies making an inevitable march onto corporate desktops. So said a panel of computer company executives at the Dow Jones-sponsored Web Ventures conference here this week. “I would say that […]