Mike Elgan

The Apple iPhone 4 became available for pre-order yesterday. Apple sold 600,000 of them in one day. The buying frenzy was so intense that AT&T servers crashed repeatedly, and the company was forced to stop taking orders. At this writing, pre-orders are available only via Best Buy. In Japan, long lines formed in the pouring […]

Everyone is talking about enterprise social networking. Vendors, IT decision-makers, pundits and press predict the widespread implementation of Facebook-like social networking within the enterprise. For example, Gartner predicts that within four years, social media will replace e-mail in one-fifth of all businesses. Unfortunately, the global conversation reveals the industry is headed in the wrong direction. […]

Everybody knows that Google offers lots of free services. Many are ad-supported. Others aren’t. They’re just free products that we can all use as a kind of publicly provisioned resource. That’s how most of us see Google. But guess what? That’s how Google sees you, too. You may or may not be a Google user. […]

User trust has suddenly become the most important attribute an Internet company can have. Who do you trust? More importantly, who do you mistrust? May 31 is “Quit Facebook Day.” Some users are outraged over new privacy policies that made sharing all personal content the default. The company “rolled out a simplified version of its […]

ALSO SEE: Google Unveils Web TV Chatter about a “convergence” between TV and PC has been going on since the mid-1990s. Many companies have tried — and failed. But this week, that convergence may finally happen successfully. Google is reportedly working with Sony, Logitech, and Intel to develop a new “Smart TV” platform based on […]

I’ll say it as plainly as I can: The iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad succeed mainly because of their user interface. No, it’s not because of Apple hype, fanboy delusion, media gullibility, dirty tricks or anything else. Apple’s multi-touch user interfaces are appealing to use for reasons most users, reviewers, bloggers and journalists don’t fully […]

Some company will own the default destination for social networking. And whoever does will rule the Web. Facebook? Twitter? Google? LinkedIn? How about Microsoft? No, really! The company unveiled at the Web 2.0 Expo event this week in San Francisco, Calif., a new service called Spindex. It’s a social media aggregator that brings together feeds […]

Microsoft announced this week that it has inked a deal with Taiwan-based High-Tech Computing (HTC). Under the agreement, HTC will pay royalties to Microsoft for phones that run Google’s Android platform. Wait, what? Microsoft claims that the Linux operating system infringes 235 Microsoft patents, and Android, which is Linux-based, violates Microsoft patents, too. Microsoft has […]

A Santa Monica, Calif.-based consumer group called Consumer Watchdog has called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and take action against Google. One “remedy” being suggested is the break up of Google into multiple companies. Sound familiar? One of the lawyers involved in a press conference held to announce the group’s call to action […]

A shocking article hit the Boston Globe newspaper Sunday. It said, in a nutshell, that changing passwords is a big waste of time and money. Wow. Really? The article was based on a paper written a year ago by Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley. The article was called “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: […]