The Open Road

Novell auction could be patent troll bonanza

On Thursday Novell reported another poor quarter with fiscal second-quarter earnings down 5.4 percent to $204 million and a declining cash balance of $980 million. That's bad for Novell investors, of course, but it may portend something even worse for the wider industry.

Patent lawsuits. Lots of them.

As reported, as many as 20 organizations have registered bids for Novell, most (or all) of them private equity firms. While an Oracle or a Cisco might acquire Novell for its maintenance streams and product portfolio, it's unclear that private equity firms will have the same motivation. For at

Memo to Microsoft: Get a new brand for mobile

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a new job: overseeing the company's entertainment and mobile businesses in the wake of high-profile executive departures. It's not the first time Ballmer has taken the reins of struggling business units, having managed the Windows and Internet search businesses directly at different times, but arguably Microsoft doesn't need new management.

It needs new brands. Especially in mobile.

Microsoft has sought to extend its Windows brand to a diverse array of technology, from SharePoint to Windows Phone. Windows is a powerful brand. But it's also a brand that screams "20th century."

And more

Google vs. Apple in the battle of the fanboys

Something strange happened last week at Google I/O, Google's big developer event. Google may have attained cult status. There was an energy in the halls normally reserved for Apple events like WWDC, as 5,000 attendees chattered about Google TV, Android, WebM, and more.

Google is ascendant, and it may take the fanboys with it.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may believe there's "not a chance" that Google is leapfrogging Apple, and assures the faithful that "[they] won't be disappointed" at WWDC, but worrisome signs abound for the iconic technology company.

The media, for one thing, is

Novell: 20 chances to reinvent itself

Most companies struggle to reinvent themselves, so shackled by their pasts that they can't reorient themselves toward the future.

Novell, once the king of the software world, is like that. Over the years it has built up a broad portfolio of software (with associated revenue streams) in repeated attempts to regain its glory days. That portfolio now stifles its ability to focus on other areas with the most promise.

But Novell's management may be about to get a lifeline. Twenty of them, actually.

According to Thursday's Wall Street Journal, up to 20 bidders, most of them private more

A hungrier, more aggressive Mozilla

Mozilla's Firefox was born during a time when Microsoft's Internet Explorer had grown so fat and lazy that hacking off a massive chunk of its market share was almost a moral duty, one with a built-in fan club. "Anything but IE" was the mantra for some, and Mozilla delivered with aplomb.

That was then, this is now, and "now" is bound to be much, much harder.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes correctly notes that "the five years ahead of Mozilla will be far tougher than the five years that's behind the company." The reason? Mozilla is no longer the white

Cloud computing's secret sauce

Vivek Kundra, the federal government's first CIO, said recently that he likes cloud computing because it provides "access to powerful technology resources faster and at lower costs."

That's a great reason and perhaps it will be the key underlying drive behind cloud computing's increased popularity as an IT delivery mechanism. But should it be the reason? That is, are there other, better reasons to move to the cloud?

Yes, there are. Among them, as Dan Woods points out, is the increased control that end users, and not just IT, gains over critical IT infrastructure. While it's

The disconnect between the tech elite and Main Street

Tim O'Reilly has built a compelling media business by "watching the alpha geeks" and using them as a compass to determine where the mainstream market will follow. Other companies like Google and Facebook, however, seem intent on building their own empires by largely ignoring this geek elite.

It turns out that the wants and needs of mainstream users can differ significantly from those of the technology elite. Geoffrey Moore figured this out years ago in his classic Crossing the Chasm.

Apparently some people missed the memo.

Silicon Valley and the techno-babblers have expressed dismay at Facebook's privacy policies more

Facebook has problems, Diaspora isn't one of them

The bigger a company becomes on the Web, the more likely it is to be accused of privacy violations. Google has been fending off privacy concerns for years, but it's now Facebook's time in the limelight.

An increasing number of people are concerned about Facebook's privacy policies. And while some are reportedly looking to jump off the Facebook train, most continue to complain...on Facebook.

Enter the Diaspora project, an open-source social network that eliminates the midddleman, the "anti-Facebook."

Diaspora attempts to solve Facebook's privacy problems at the infrastructure layer, using a decentralized, peer-to-peer approach. Unfortunately,

Fragmenting Linux is not the way to beat Apple

In an attempt to copycat Apple's hardware-plus-software vertical approach to the mobile market, the Linux industry is fragmenting fast and risks undermining its best chance for beating the iPhone.

The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. Whereas Linux has been a rallying force in the enterprise server market, with diverse competitors and partners collaborating on a common code base to save costs and boost innovation, in the mobile market Linux has tended toward entropy.

Such entropy more