Tech Blog

OPINION

The United States of Google

I was watching "The Daily Show" the other night and Jon Stewart walked through the failures of the Obama administration, concluding that anyone who did this badly couldn't be reelected if not for the Democrats' secret weapon. He then showed Mitt Romney as that secret weapon, along with a number of t...

OPINION

Microsoft's Perfect Wave

Sometimes if you stand back a moment, which is what I have to do, you suddenly see broader trends, and what I'm seeing now is that the planets seem to be aligning for a Microsoft decade. However, I'm reminded that the difference between chance and luck is the difference between a hundred bucks landi...

OPINION

Mrs. Jobs' Smartphone

Last week at Intel's Developer Forum, I was on a panel of folks -- led by renowned futurist Briand David Johnson -- who are trying to make sure future products are better at taking into account the people they are designed for. This purpose was connected to one of the major points made by Dr. Genevi...

OPINION

How Amazon Stole the Tablet Market

As Apple demonstrated itself with the iPod and iPad, the way to take control of a market is to redefine it around a model that favors your products. Last week, Amazon took a page from Steve Jobs' book, both in how it presented the new Kindle line and in how this line shifts the market dynamic from o...

The Windows 8 launch in October promises to be like no other launch. I think it will drive home several points that many of us don't seem to understand, like the fact that we both whine there isn't enough innovation and run for the hills when someone innovates in a mature market. I think Microsoft w...

EXPERT ADVICE

5 Warning Signs of Ineffective Security

Most cars nowadays come with driver and passenger airbags. It's a great safety feature that's helped save numerous lives since installing them routinely has become the norm. But sometimes, though it is rare, airbags fail to deploy even when circumstances arise where they should. Ask yourself: How ...

In Silicon Valley where Apple is located, burglaries are up more than 30 percent, largely because police have stopped responding to them. If you are reasonably well off, particularly if you are Asian, and you like nice stuff, the chance you'll get burglarized near Apple's new headquarters is approac...

I was reading James Kendrick's column on Windows 8 tablets over last week, and he is clearly having trouble adapting to what is becoming a tablet world. James and I came from the first age of personal computers. I'm pretty sure he's younger than I am, and I think he is showcasing what will be a prob...

We watch citizens overthrow governments and assume the same thing couldn't happen here. But we have had one big civil war in the U.S., and several states -- including California, where I live -- have been talking about getting out of the U.S. for decades. What appears to keep us together isn't the p...

I've written about keeping your devices powered while on the road before, and looked at techniques to reduce draw -- like reducing screen brightness and switching off phone radios. I also took a broad-brush look at different technologies, like battery packs and solar. Now I'm going to explain how t...

The details of the recent Colorado massacre are bothering me this week. What bothers me the most is that both political parties seem to take an event like this and use it to further an agenda. The right wants everyone to get armed, and the left wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. The ...

Most security professionals are probably very comfortable with using open source tools to implement technical security functionality. From nikto to snort to openssh -- there are literally hundreds of well-known, sophisticated, open source tools that perform useful and critical security functions. Th...

OPINION

Obama vs. Romney: An MBA's View

I've been watching the battle for the White House with some trepidation, largely because I believe that given how dysfunctional Congress is, even a god would be ineffective as president. I voted for and have largely been disappointed in Obama who has so far repeated most of Jimmy Carter's mistakes....

Forced Employee Ranking, a process that ensures incompetence in companies, has been sourced, as a failure, to Jack Welch -- the guy credited with turning around GE. I began to wonder if much of what he was credited with actually created what now appears to be a cancer in that company, and in Microso...

The last time we had a major "social networking" type of effort it was with collaboration, and the poster child for the effort was Lotus Notes. It largely failed -- not because the idea wasn't a good one, but because the company fundamentally didn't understand that the market was being made hostile ...

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