Robert J. Mullins

Competitors like SAP and Oracle used to scoff at the business model of Salesforce.com with its software as a service delivered in the cloud. Now they are emulating Salesforce’s model and they, along with Microsoft, are trying to apply more competitive pressure on the cloud enterprise application company. Salesforce upped its game Aug. 14 with […]

Toshiba says it is passing on the opportunity to introduce a new tablet running Microsoft Windows RT on the launch date of Oct. 26 because of delays in the shipment of components from suppliers. In an email, Toshiba said the component delays “would make a timely launch impossible.” The company does plan to launch a […]

The federal judge presiding over the patent infringement trial of Apple against Samsung over the design of smartphones and tablet computers suggested in court on Aug. 15 that the parties might want to settle the case because testimony indicates both might have infringed on each other’s patents. “I see risk here for both sides,” said […]

Samsung says its smartphones and tablet computers were not based on Apple’s iPhone or iPad, but on many products and some of Samsung’s own patents. The testimony came Aug. 14 in Apple’s patent infringement suit against Samsung, which claims that Samsung copied design features of Apple’s iPhone and iPad in designing its competing products. In […]

Symantec, known for network security and storage management technology, offers what it says is an easier way for enterprises to perform big data analytics on their vast databases of operational information. The Symantec Enterprise Solution for Hadoop, introduced Aug. 13, is a free add-on to the Symantec Veritas Cluster File System for storage area networks. […]

Microsoft issued nine security bulletins, five of them critical, in its Aug. 14 Patch Tuesday update, while Adobe issued patches for various versions of Reader and Acrobat for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The Microsoft patches start with Internet Explorer, mostly IE6, 7 and 8, but also the current version, IE9. Microsoft […]

Samsung began presenting its case Aug. 13 in a federal court trial over Samsung’s alleged infringement of Apple product patents, arguing that there was ample “prior art” in the marketplace before the iPhone came along. Samsung’s first witness in the trial underway in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., was Ben Bederson, a computer […]

Microsoft has released details of the work it is doing with OEMs on tablet and desktop PCs running Windows 8 and Windows RT-apparently to show that OEMs are unfazed by Microsoft’s plan to compete against them with its own Surface tablet, despite opposition expressed publicly by Acer. In a blog post Aug. 13 discussing the […]

Microsoft is stepping up its retail strategy to sell the Surface tablet and other Microsoft products this holiday season by posting job openings for a dozen “pop-up” stores around the United States. The company is seeking to staff temporary stores on top of the 31 Microsoft Stores already open or about to open. In retail […]

Apple attorneys told a federal judge that they expect to wrap up their presentation on Aug. 13 in the $2.5 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung for copying Apple’s designs for iPhone and iPad devices in Samsung’s smartphone and tablet products. Testimony in the case on Aug. 10 focused on features in an iPhone that Apples […]