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 so much hardware; There are too many processing steps in our hosting. We can continue to do manual steps when first upgrade Business ByDesign from 1.0 to 1.1, but it's not predictable in way where every client got it at once and in the same way."

Larry remarks on AMD's lack of transparency about its chip fabrication plans and product roadmap, and I recap my visit to JavaOne, where I met rocker Neil Young and interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz about his plans for JavaFX and cloud computing. Schwartz has a good plan, but getting developers on board will take some heavy lifting.

We also debate whether Microsoft is open to a union with Yahoo after the parting of ways.