Economics

Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.

According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be "investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."

Enterprise search remains a lucrative, if oddly fractured market. According to analyst firm Gartner, in 2008, software revenue (new licenses and maintenance revenue) in the enterprise … Read more

With Microsoft finally releasing the Windows Azure cloud operating system to the public earlier this week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) took just one day to offer new pricing reductions to re-establish the market price for cloud services.

Effective February 1, AWS is reducing prices by 2 cents per gigabyte based on the tiers of usage offer. Amazon also lowered rates for data transferred out of its Amazon CloudFront content delivery network, cutting rates by 2 cents per gigabyte. And while 2 cents may not sound like much, at the highest usage levels of 1,000 terabytes, that takes the cost … Read more

Analyst firm Gartner is out with five predictions for social software, the net of which shows that social media functions will both succeed and fail in the enterprise.

Gartner believes that social services will be embraced, but perhaps not in the way we thought they would. In boiling down the various social mediums into mechanics such as interpersonal communications or performance analysis, it becomes a bit clearer how these services will be adopted in the enterprise. It also gives a glimpse into areas start-ups can target to solve business problems.

Gartner's five social software predictions for 2010 and beyond: … Read more

Several months back, I spoke with Issac Roth, CEO of platform-as-a-service start-up WebappVM, about taking advantage of the cloud by moving to a virtual layer approach.

The idea behind this virtual layer is to enable developers to easily take Web applications to cloud environments--be they private, public, hybrid, or elsewhere in the ether.

On Tuesday, Roth and company are announcing the developer edition for their Cloud Application Platform with a newer, catchier name: Makara.

According to Roth, developers want to be able to get their apps up and running quickly but haven't had the ability to do so previously. … Read more

In a recent interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia, Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci made the case that the company has seen dramatic success in the PC market because it abandoned direct sales.

Acer has a huge market presence in Europe and Russia and has focused on market share over profitability, with an operating profit of just 2-3 percent, according to analyst firm Gartner. Thus far it's worked; Acer's global PC market share hit 21 percent in Q3 2009, just 1 percent behind HP and a percent or two above Dell.

Shocked? Me too.

Because PCs are commodities, Lanci argues that brand recognition and exterior styling are the most important factors for consumers. And obviously the products have to work well enough for consumers to continue to buy them. In fact, Lanci has used a similar argument in the past to suggest that "U.S. computer brands may disappear over the next 20 years, just like what happened to U.S. television brands."

Whether or not Lanci is correct, most observers agree that PCs and servers have become commodities. To some extent it's surprising to see Acer's "good enough" hardware make such large gains. This may be because the markets that are buying Acer products have less PC history, and newer machines are dramatically better than the computers and servers of 10 years ago.

In complete contrast, Oracle, with its newly acquired Sun hardware business, announced last week that it would go in the opposite direction and start selling direct in order to gain back the profit margin lost to VARs. … Read more

Research shows the demand for Linux talent is on the rise with some firms reporting a 50 percent increase in Linux-related jobs just in the last year. This is certainly good news if you already know how to work with Linux, and perhaps better news if you are looking for a new technical role.

The nonprofit Linux Foundation is looking to help meet this need with an expanded training program that includes a free Webinar series hosted by leading technical talent from the Linux kernel community and expanded classes in new locations around the world.

There are many Linux training … Read more

The U.S. market for virtual goods will reach $1.6 billion in 2010, with social gaming contributing $835 million of that, according to a new report released Tuesday by research firm Inside Network. Virtual good sales were expected to clear $1 billion in 2009, a substantial increase year-over-year.

International sales of virtual goods have outpaced the U.S. rather dramatically, as witnessed by the explosive growth in South Korea and China, which had 2009 sales estimates of $3.5 billion to $4 billion with the market expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2012.

"Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming&… Read more

Quite a bit of hype surrounds Square, the mobile payment processing service founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. But mobile payment processing is hardly a new concept, as companies like Symbol (now owned by Motorola) have long offering a wide array of devices.

The big deal is not the concept, but the fact that you can turn your iPhone or other mobile device into an on-demand payment processing service.

I spoke to Tom Patterson, chief security officer of MagTek, a provider of electronic devices for the secure transfer of payment data, to understand the implications of this new wave of … Read more

Virtual currency has been one of the more confusing areas of gaming and social networking, with different sites, games and even countries treating currency and goods differently.

South Korea has decided that virtual currency is the equivalent of real-world money bringing to light some very real ramifications for users not just in Korea but in other countries as well.

The ruling allowing "cyber money" is the first in Korea and was based on the acquittal of two gamers indicted on charges of illegally making money by selling goods earned in the game Lineage.

In-game or in-site currency has … Read more