E-Piphanies

Google Drains Brains To Google Ventures

The news that Google Sites chief Joe Kraus has moved to Google Venture, Google’s venture capital arm, is part of a larger strategy that has more to do with human resources than capital investments.

Like many rivals in IT, Google (GOOG) doesn’t have any place for many of its top executives to  go; no one is going to supplant Larry Ellison at Oracle (ORCL) or Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com (CRM), to name a couple. But Oracle and Salesforce.com do have a way to deal with high-powered and creative executives without losing them to rival outfits: they provide capital for start-ups. Benioff got more than Ellison’s blessing to start Salesforce, and Benioff has himself invested in start-ups by his own executives, like Tien Tzuo, who started cloud billing vendor Zuora last year.

To read more, please see Google Drains Brains To Google Ventures on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Microsoft Losing More Ground To Google, Apple

Internet Explorer is slowly losing market share to its biggest rivals, Apple and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), for reasons as disparate as they are significant.

If you compare browser market share data from Net Applications for IE, Chrome and Safari for September 2009 versus September 2008 (as illustrated by the Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio), it's pretty clear that Microsoft has given up nine points of market share to Firefox (+4 basis points), Chrome (+3), and Safari (+2).

To read more, please see Microsoft Losing More Ground To Google, Apple on my Digital Life blog at BNET.

WhiteHouse.gov Drupal Detractors Get Buggy

The news that WhiteHouse.gov relaunched this week running open source Drupal software raised eyebrows and hackles among knee-jerk anti-Obama types and a small cadre of ignorant bloggers.

Most online detractors referred to an article by Slate's Chris Wilson that laid out a number of reasons why the Obama Administration erred in picking Drupal, arguing that

If the administration had conducted a few polls among the swing demographic of Web site administrators, it would have realized that Drupal is pocked with political landmines.

Well, Wilson is an assistant editor at Slate, which may or may not mean he has any technical expertise himself. Not wanting to go down that road myself, I did some polling of my own, reaching out to Josef Bettancourt (JB to his friends), a Web developer with whom I've worked at a couple of different publications.

To read more, please see WhiteHouse.gov Drupal Detractors Get Buggy on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

Why Faster Chips Won't Help Juniper Catch Cisco

Juniper Networks introduced a new chipset, as well as a new router and network application platform today at the New York Stock Exchange, which it also counts as a customer.

That’s an important point, as enterprise customers in areas like financial services, where speed is a critical component of stock trading, as well as health care, government and entertainment, are starting to require faster and more flexible networking capabilities to meet surging demand for bandwidth to support IP-based video, telephony and collaboration tools. The same holds true for the telecommunications, cable and other Internet service providers that serve those industries.

To read more, please see Why Faster Chips Won't Help Juniper Catch Cisco on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Social Media Influence Elections, Not Laws

We've seen how social media like Twitter and Facebook can be used as part of a winning election strategy, but the same tools don't seem to influence elected officials or public policy.

Maybe it's because elected officials are rarely on Facebook or Twitter themselves -- those posts you see are from their proxies. Or maybe there's something different about the dynamic when it comes to generating momentum for or against a given law -- it's easier to get excited about a person than a law -- but there's also more fragmentation in cyberspace.

To read more, please see Social Media Influence Elections, Not Laws on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

Salesforce CEO Shares Strategy

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s new book, Behind the Cloud, is remarkable if for no other reason that it’s a candid account of the company’s growing pains and isn’t just the usual self-serving claptrap when it comes to Benioff’s own career. Benioff also shares strategy about how the company intends to maintain its edge, even after having established itself as the market leader in the cloud-based software market.

Competitors, both cloud vendors like NetSuite (N), as well as traditional business software vendors like SAP (SAP), Oracle (ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT), should take heed that while Salesforce.com (CRM) will probably not reject its basic principles (such as a multi-tenant architecture, in which all customers share the same instance of the software and have their data stored on common servers), the company isn’t afraid to reverse field and adapt to changes in the market and its own fortunes.

To read more, please see Salesforce CEO Shares Strategy on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Juniper Looks to Redefine Networking

Juniper hopes to seize the Web 2.0 day by offering enterprise and service provider customers with a new set of cutting-edge networking technologies, which it introduced today at the New York Stock Exchange.

With telcos looking to provide better services at higher margins, and enterprise customers needing to meet surging demand for bandwidth to support IP-based video, telephony and collaboration tools, Juniper unveiled routers based on a new processor architecture that it claims is several orders of magnitude faster than anything else on the market.

To read more, please see Juniper Looks to Redefine Networking at CTO Edge.

Innovation, Not Cost, New Cloud Battle Cry

Maybe folks are simply trying to talk themselves out of the recession (which would be a good thing in itself), but it seems like the conversation around cloud computing is shifting from cost-cutting to unleashing innovation.

It seemed pretty natural over the past couple of difficult years to hear both vendors and their customers in enterprise IT talk about cloud computing as a way of essentially outsourcing IT management and shifting the burden of capex from the enterprise to the application and hardware vendors.

To read more, please see Innovation, Not Cost, New Cloud Battle Cry on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

FCC Considering Spectrum Swap Between Broadcasters, Carriers

A Washington, D.C.-based market research firm says Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staff is talking with TV broadcasters about buying back some spectrum that it would then lease or auction to wireless carriers, with the broadcasters getting in on the action.

This makes a lot of sense, particularly given the concerns the Obama Administration has expressed over the paucity of wireless spectrum, and how that scarcity hovers over the burgeoning wireless industry as mobile Internet usage explodes. According to Blair Levin, the person in charge of crafting the FCC’s national broadband plan, “The record is very clear that we’re facing a looming spectrum gap.”

To read more, please see FCC Considering Spectrum Swap Between Broadcasters, Carriers on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Windows 7 Upgrade Causing 'Endless Boot Loop'

You know that “Broken Promises” ad that Apple is running on TV these days, which essentially calls Microsoft a liar for saying that Windows 7 is “different” because it won’t cause the problems that previous operating systems did for customers?

At first blush, the ad seemed mean-spirited to me, but those screams you’re hearing are from Microsoft users trying, and mostly failing, to upgrade to Windows 7. Worse, there are currently hundreds of posts on the Microsoft Windows 7 forum from frustrated users stuck in an “endless boot loop.”

To read more, please see Windows 7 Upgrade Causing 'Endless Boot Loop' on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.