We still view GOOG’s acquisition of the football coaching headphone equipment company as highly risky, but given signs that Amazon & Facebook may also enter the Smartphone market, GOOG’s move isn’t unprecedented.
– Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney, who is upgrading his Google rating to “buy” from “neutral,” despite his lack of enthusiasm for the $12.5 billion Motorola deal. On the bright side, he adds, if regulators approve the purchase next year, it will “still provide GOOG with patent support, & it’s an accretive deal.”
Kara Swisher in Enterprise on July 13, 2011 at 10:31 am PT
VMware CEO Paul Maritz has his hands full trying to keep the lead in the hyper-competitive virtualization space, as more and more businesses move into the cloud.
He talks about the complexities and the competition with companies like Microsoft, where — irony alert — he was a former top exec and is often mentioned as the best candidate to be its next CEO.
Voices
Michael Hickins, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on February 23, 2011 at 12:05 pm PT
Microsoft has confirmed reports that an update that went out to new Windows Phone 7 handsets on Monday has a glitch affecting some handsets manufactured by Samsung. A Microsoft spokeswoman told Digits that the upgrade still appears as available to all Windows Phone 7 users, but that Samsung owners get a message saying that the upgrade is no longer available to them.
Peter Kafka in Media on February 15, 2011 at 4:29 am PT
Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman and other directors you can’t see in Imax join the video service’s catalog.
Walt Mossberg in Personal Technology on February 9, 2011 at 6:01 pm PT
Dell’s Streak 7 is the least expensive tablet from a major manufacturer and claims to be the first capable of 4G cellular speeds, but the compromises made to get the price down make it impossible to recommend.
John Paczkowski in Mobile on January 31, 2011 at 4:43 am PT
If you were hoping that Apple, through some combination of engineering acumen, force of will and luck, would overcome the power consumption and cost issues preventing it from adding a high-resolution retina display to the iPad 2, it may be time to relinquish the dream. Because a new set of specs cited by Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst for Concord Securities in Taiwan, suggests the device will feature the same 1024×768 resolution display as its predecessor.
John Paczkowski in Mobile on January 28, 2011 at 4:00 am PT
A metric worth mulling as AT&T’s previously monogamous relationship with Apple shifts into polyamory: 90 percent of the carrier’s iPhone users are still under contract.
John Paczkowski in Mobile on January 27, 2011 at 4:30 am PT
It’s indisputable that Verizon is going to sell a lot of iPhones when the device finally arrives on its network. The question is how many? And the answer is as varied as the research houses trying to pinpoint it. On the low end, analysts have been calling for nine million, and at the highest end, 12 million. Until today, when R.W. Baird & Co. analyst William Power reset those parameters with a bullish new potentiality.
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on January 19, 2011 at 8:56 am PT
Nintendo announced the pricing and release date today for the 3DS, which it hopes will rejuvenate sales as its other hardware platforms start aging.
Ina Fried in Mobile on January 18, 2011 at 11:32 am PT
Starting Jan. 30, Sprint plans to charge all new Android, BlackBerry, Instinct, Palm and Windows Mobile data customers the extra fee. The charge had previously applied only to the carrier’s 4G phones, such as the Evo and Epic.
