Blog Archives
Red Hat joins the S&P 500
By David Needle | July 17, 2009[Standard and Poor's ](http://www.standardandpoors.com)announced that Red Hat would join the S&P 500 as of the close of trading on Friday. Red Hat replaces lender CIT Group, which had a market capitalization below $275 million, ranking it 500th in the index.
The market seemed to like the S&P news. In after hours trading Friday, Red Hat was up 8.45 percent to $22.34.
Red Hat, the fast-growing provider of open source software solutions to enterprise customers, will be added to the S&P 500 GICS (Global Industry Classification Standard) Systems Software Sub-Industry index.
The company has been aggressively pursuing new opportunities to help companies interested in Linux and open source adoption including the latest trend toward [cloud computing]().
Red Hat recently announced a [cloud certification program](/dev-news/article.php/3828346/Cisco%20Red%20Hat%20in%20the%20Cloud%20Friends%20or%20Enemies.htm) and enlisted Amazon as a partner.
Plucky Zoho stares down death
By David Needle | July 16, 2009Salesforce and Google Apps are probably the best known software as a service (SaaS) applications, but another early player, Zoho, has been rapidly expanding its innovative lineup of applications beyond the scope of the market leaders.
This week Microsoft confirmed its plans to offer [free cloud-based, lightweight versions ](/software/article.php/3829386/Office+2010+Debut+Free+Online+Edition+Near.htm)of its Office 2010 apps next year. Zoho's suite of businesss/productivity applications has been free for years, but it sounds like that advantage is going to rapidly disappear. For his part, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu claims to be amused by speculation Microsoft's moves are a death knell to Zoho prospects.
"But if there's anything I've learned from my years in the tech world is that companies don't get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide," he said in [a blog post](http://blogs.zoho.com/general/companies-don-t-get-killed-by-competition-they-commit-suicide). "Office 2010 *will* be the end of Zoho, if we stop innovating, stop being nimble and flexible in our business model. Then again, if we stop all that, Zoho will die *anyway*, no Office 2010 needed to do the job."
He correctly points out that Microsoft has a "natural advantage" given its size and installed based. In Zoho's corner?
" ...being nimble and flexible, spotting opportunities and grabbing them quickly," says Vembu.
He also notes this is not the first time Zoho has faced the prospect of extinction.
"3 years ago when Google entered this market, it was also deemed to be the end of Zoho -- now, just how many times are we supposed to die? All of Zoho was about 30 people at that time, and now it is over 300. We have released over 15 new services in Zoho after Google's entry into the market, and made numerous updates to all our services."
**The power of free**
In some ways, Zoho has the same strategic flexibility versus Microsoft as Google does, i.e. not having to protect a $16 billion high-margin revenue stream.
But hey, I think most savvy biz folks will tell you that's a nice problem to have.
Way, way back in the early '90s, desktop publishing pioneer Aldus released one of the first desktop presentation programs (originally for the Mac and later Windows). [Persuasion ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Persuasion)was a heck of a program for its time, but it also cost a few hundred dollars. When Microsoft decided to bundle its business apps in an Office suite that included PowerPoint, it was game over for Persuasion.
"It's hard to compete with free," I recall Aldus founder Paul Brainerd saying. But these days it seems like free is part of every company's playbook.
Larry Ellison to buy Golden State Warriors?
By David Needle | July 09, 2009That's the speculation by *Mercury News* reporter Tim Kawakami in a [column ](http://www.mercurynews.com/topstories/ci_12789923?nclick_check=1)today. Citing several "high placed sources," Kawakami said current Warriors owner Chris Cohan recently held buy-out talks with Oracle's billionaire CEO as well as the four-person group that owns a twenty percent share of the franchise.
Oracle already owns naming rights to the Warriors home arena, referred to locally as "The Oracle." The four minority owners are tech heavyweights in their own right:
Michael Marks is former CEO of Flextronics and currently a partner in [Riverwood Capital](http://riverwoodcapital.com/team.html); Jim Davidson is co-founder and chairman of mega-tech investor [Silver Lake](http://www.silverlake.com/employee.php?page=team&id=3); [John Thompson](http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/management/directors/bio.jsp?bioid=john_thompson) is former CEO and current chairman of Symantec and [Fred Harman i](http://www.oakvc.com/team/detail/fred/)s a managing partner of tech investor Oak Investment Partners.
Kawakami said the Warriors franchise was valued at about $300 million back in 2004, but it's not known what the current asking price might be. Cohan has resisted earlier offers to buy the team, which, save for two playoff runs has had mostly losing seasons during his 15-year tenure. Kawakami said a sale could happen "in a year or two, if not much sooner" subject to review and approval of the NBA.
If the billionaire Ellison is determined to buy the Warriors, Kawakami correctly notes there is no one likely to match him dollar for dollar. (His buddy Steve Jobs is not a sports fan).
Ellison would join Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, as among notable tech heavyweights to also own a professional sports team. Allen owns the NBA Portland Trailblazers.
And let's not forget [HDNet ](http://www.hd.net) founder Mark Cuban. Cuban made billions off the sale of Broadcast.com in 1999 to Yahoo which led to his purchase of the Dallas Mavericks the next year for $285 million from Ross Perot, Jr. (son of former presidential candidate Ross Perot), the chairman of Perot Systems.
Brad and Angelina did what?
By David Needle | July 01, 2009Chances are you already know.
According to a new report by Internet research firm [comScore,](http://www.comscore.com) nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a seven percent increase over the previous year. Online video has also become an increasingly important channel for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53 percent in the past year.
"What's also interesting is that Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by 'snacking' on these news updates throughout the workday," says comScore executive VP Jack Flanagan. "In fact, nearly half of all time spent on entertainment news sites comes from work computers."
comScore estimates that more than a quarter of U.S. Internet users visited an entertainment news site in May 2009. Leading the way was Yahoo's celebrity gossip site, omg! with 20.6 million visitors, nearly doubling its audience in the past year.
[TMZ](http://tmz.com) captured the #2 ranking with 9.9 million visitors (up 7 percent versus year ago), followed by People with 8.2 million visitors.
*(PHOTO CREDIT: TMZ.com).*
Other big gainers include [USmagazine.com](http://usmagazine.com), up 325 percent to 6.5 million visitors, [Entertainment Weekly,](http://entertainmentweekly.com) up 64 percent to nearly 4 million visitors, and [The Insider](http://theinsider.com), which grew 215 percent to 2.5 million visitors.
**Celebrity overload**
I noticed USmagazine was getting so much action today the site was briefly inaccessible. A message on the site explaining the outage said: "Sorry, we've gone into celebrity overload!"
Not surprising. In total, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes - or approximately 15 million hours - on entertainment news sites, with 44 percent of the total time spent in the category occurring at, yes, you guessed it, the workplace.
BTW, if like me you're not familiar with OMG!, don't assume it's at www.omg.com. That Web site belongs, in fact to the [Object Management Group](http://omg.com) that helps develop enterprise integration standards and could lead you to do actual work.
OMG!
