With the cacophony of announcements around Artificial Intelligence (AI) from many of the leading software vendors, you’d be forgiven for believing that each presents a unique direction to be investigated. The reality though is that while there are clear signs for differentiating focus, the hurdles and barriers for AI are common and the intentions and [...]
The European Union has fined Google €4 billion for acting, in what it says, is an anti-competitive way. This does not come as a surprise; the EU has a history with big US tech companies. One is reminded of its high-profile battle with Microsoft that resulted in a fine. Google’s “crime” is to use its [...]
We are entering a time of "cognitive computing" – the start of what some call the 3rd era that will include Artificial Intelligence (AI). Cognitive has been brought to the public conscious by IBM and its IBM Watson program. From winning the game show Jeopardy on US TV to advising Oncologists with patient treatment plans [...]
Last week Amazon published financials for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business for the first time. These showed that the old man of public cloud computing is a $5bn business with 49% year-over-year growth. The data also showed that Amazon experiences healthy margins on AWS which puts them in a good position to handle the [...]
With all that has been said recently about Windows I feel that there are some important issues that often get ignored. Much of the narrative focuses on whether people will like Windows 10 and that if they don't it inherently means the end of Windows and Microsoft. For 20 years I have worked as a [...]
The arms race amongst the big cloud vendors continues this week with announcements from Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Microsoft, who is showing love to everyone these days, has a new relationship with IBM in which they will offer official support for some IBM products running on Virtual Machines in Azure. In the spirit of quid [...]
Ever since Microsoft released Windows 8 there has been fierce debate over whether it is a good OS. Many complained about the “Metro” (or Modern) interface and of course the loss of the Start button (subsequently returned). Some have said that it is the new Vista which was of course a disaster for Microsoft, or [...]
The news that Satya Nadella has been appointed CEO of Microsoft is not just a massive change for the company but the technology sector as a whole. Rarely do the most senior positions in the big West Coast tech behemoths change hands. Just think about Larry at Oracle, Benioff at Salesforce, Zuckerberg at Facebook or [...]
Last week Microsoft launched the latest version of their leading development tool Visual Studio 2013 at a special event in New York. Microsoft have kept their promise to deliver a rapid release cadence with Visual Studio by putting out 3 updates to last year’s Visual Studio 2012 (a fourth was released last week) over the [...]
The press has been awash in the last week with speculation over the Microsoft and Nokia deal. The reality is that this is a deal that has been almost two years in the making and not something new. What everyone is trying to work out now, is will this save Microsoft, the Nokia phone business [...]
