Sun

Microsoft's Manhattan Project

This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.

Ray Ozzie explains Azure to CNET News correspondent Ina Fried.

As in past epochs in its 33-year history, Microsoft … Read more

EIC Squared: Will the tech sector melt down in the economic crisis?

In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about how the economic crisis will impact the tech sector. Both the House and Senate have passed the bailout package, but the legislation doesn't mean that tech or any other industry sector will reverse the downward spiral. Tech companies and financial analysts are rapidly cutting estimates to prepare for a potential nuclear winter in the global economy.

We also discuss Microsoft's forthcoming moves into cloud computing and the state of citizen journalism following the fake Steve Jobs heart attack story that showed up on … Read more

Cloud computing hangover

After attending GigaOM's Structure 08, I came away with a cloud-computing hangover. Just trying to define cloud computing is daunting given all the hype and companies thunderclapping.

Today the research firm Gartner has jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon, proclaiming that it "heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business," and defining it as massively scalable IT-related capabilities provided as a service using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.

Yahoo just announced a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which will develop computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. What was Yahoo … Read more

Jonathan Schwartz's free software foundation

Sun Microsystems has become its own free software foundation, open-sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open-source MySQL database for $1 billion in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue.

It seems counter-intuitive, but Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been betting the company on that strategy. Speaking at the Supernova 2008 conference, Schwartz explained that free software brings the marginal cost to acquire a customer to zero and helps drive revenue.

Schwartz showed a world map with clusters of dots representing all the people who registered with Sun when they downloaded ZFS (an open-source … Read more

EIC Squared: SAP, Sun, AMD and Microhoo

In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest news from SAP, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, and Microhoo. At SAP's Sapphire conference this week, company executives explained the delayed rollout of the new on-demand enterprise suite, Business ByDesign. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said that the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation on Business ByDesign and the upgrade procedures weren't good enough:

"We know we can have TCO, but need NetWeaver enhancements. There's a very close link between the TCO of Business ByDesign and NetWeaver. The TCO is not … Read more

Sun heading into the cloud

SAN FRANCISCO--While an interview with Neil Young has been my big highlight of JavaOne, I also managed to hook up with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz for a video interview. We talked about Project Hydrazine, a new cloud computing initiative with services similar to what Google and Amazon.com offer. We also discussed JavaFX, Sun's competitor to Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, and Project Insight, which is designed to gather instrumented user action data via JavaFX and provide it to developers.

JavaFX, which includes a runtime, scripting, and a media framework, could have a hard time competing with Adobe and … Read more

Neil Young rocks JavaOne

Editor's note: News.com's Dan Farber reported Young's keynote speech and a follow-up Q&A live from JavaOne.

SAN FRANCISCO--At JavaOne here, Neil Young showed off his multimedia project that chronicles his music career and uses Java to do so.

Young said he tried to do the project on DVD, but users couldn't watch the high-resolution video and listen to the music at the same time. With Java and Blu-ray, the content can be updated and offer the best viewing and listening experience, as well as great navigation and design. "Storage is the only … Read more

JavaOne: Sun rolls out JavaFX

SAN FRANCISCO--Following a flurry of T-shirts catapulted by Java creator James Gosling and a hot dance troop performance, 75 hours of JavaOne got under way here this week. Sun Microsystems' software chief, Rich Green, took the stage to talk about consumers, people he sees as driving change.

"Information is crossing the moat, escaping the castle," he said. "The private information network is gone." Enterprises have to recognize that the enterprise moat barriers are coming down, he added, with consumers driving innovation.

As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment … Read more

EIC Squared: Microhoo; Google and Big Blue; and Sun's blues

This week on the EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest reports surrounding the Microsoft-Yahoo mating dance. We expect some news later Friday or early next week as to which way Microsoft is leaning--fight or flight.

I visited with IBM executives this week, and share with Larry my thoughts on IBM's focus on the mainframe and its budding relationship with Google. In addition, we discuss Sun's challenges in turning free, open-source software into profits for the company. And we talk about the upcoming JavaOne and SAP Sapphire conferences.