Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Steve Jobs' reputation as an idealist and a control freak precedes him everywhere he goes. Before yesterday, if you asked the age-old question of why other companies like Dell (ones that are better at minimizing hardware manufacturing costs) don't make computers that run Apple's operating systems, they would have no choice but to make a pit stop at the PowerPC question.
A Spanish designer has created a smart washing machine that uses a fingerprint sensor to identify its users and ensure that the same person doesn't do laundry twice in a row. The apparent intent is to enforce a fix for a long-standing perceived gender imbalance, to wit: Women always do the laundry while men, for their part, tend to contribute by watching football.
The morning after of the Apple/IBM tryst is full of pundits explaining why they got it wrong when they dismissed the notion of such a union. Michael Kanellos offers his entertaining mea culpa ("They say animals can sense things early, but I completely ignored the fact that two weeks ago my cat started drinking coffee and fiddling with the band saw.
Tim O'Reilly and Where 2.0 conference co-chair Nat Torkington held a conference call last week for journalists looking to get a leg up on what to expect from the new event when it opens in San Francisco on June 29.
Over at the IT Garage, Doc Searls goes through some history of Microsoft's InfoCard initiative and asks some good questions. InfoCard is an identity metasystem that Doc correctly describes as a "barn raising project" led by Microsoft.
While Apple and Intel CEOs Steve Jobs and Paul Otellini took the stage at Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference to make their partnership official and to discuss just exactly what the future holds, the blogosphere and the analysts are all abuzz with the analyses of what went wrong between Apple and IBM and what, if anything, will change significantly for current and future Apple customers.
In somewhat of an anticlimax, Steve Jobs announced the shift from Power PC to Intel x86 over the next few years. Based on the what Jobs said, IBM's delay in providing a processors for Power Mac and Intel's roadmap clinched the decision.
Continuing as one of the few executives making good use of blogs, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz just posted a justification for the StorageTek acquistion and an invitation to Apple to adopt Solaris 10. Regarding StorageTek, Schwartz provides deeper logic for making the deal, which brings in money but primarily in a slow growth, non-sexy area--tape.
Actually, there are laws; laws against false advertising. According to our in-house WiFi guru George Ou, most of the WiFi vendors are getting away with murder and no one is holding them accountable for it.
I was reading Dan Farber's post this morning and was struck by the first line that juxtaposed the title of the Churchill Club panel session he attended -- "Masters of Cybercrime: The Ultimate Battle of Good and Evil" -- against the panelists' consensus on how good is actually faring against evil in that battle. Apparently, it's losing.