Christopher Saunders

Oh, melancholy game publishers. Your industry is so wildly successful that it’s practically printing money. And yet, like your brethren in the music and film industries, you’re also pointing to piracy on file-sharing networks like BitTorrent as a source of lost sales — and you’re looking to clamp down. Fair enough. Now, how to go […]

Tech bellwether and PC manufacturing leader HP beat Wall Street expectations for its most recent quarter, continuing the trend of U.S.-based technology giants posting growth on strength in emerging foreign markets. In its fiscal third-quarter 2008 earnings, the company posted $28 billion in revenues, up 10 percent compared to last year. On that performance, the […]

Have netbooks jumped the shark? For a while there, it looked like the nascent trend of diminutive, lightweight, inexpensive, low-end notebook PCs — netbooks — were about to be undone by the company that jumpstarted it all. I’m referring here to Asus, maker of the Eee PC… and its many, many permutations: There’s the Eee […]

Janet, I mean. I’m talking about the online persona widely thought to be, perhaps be, have been, or have never been a representative or employee of Exxon Mobil. Last week, those following events in the Twittersphere (is “-sphere” the only suffix we can think of for these little environments?) were following what appeared to be […]

It’s the week of E3, as any gamer, game industry insider or entertainment retail analyst could tell you. And what’s the news from the game industry expo? Big releases, exclusivity deals — the usual. Instead of getting into gaming news specifically, I want to take a look at how Microsoft is progressing in turning its […]

With all the coverage about Bill Gates’ “departure” from Microsoft last week, a few of the stories contained some fascinating details — not so much about Gates, but on the wonderfully unique entity that is Steve Ballmer, that occasionally rage-prone bear of a software executive who also evidently has a soft spot for Hollywood musicals. […]

A blast from the past Yahoo is poised, in just a few minutes, to begin accepting registrations for @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com e-mail addresses. That’s all well and good. But I really hope this isn’t seriously thought of as a maneuver against Google’s ever-growing Gmail. In fact, it seems obvious to me that the people most […]

Amazon.com, the Web’s largest e-commerce site (well, not counting eBay) and a bellwether for the entire Internet industry, is experiencing technical difficulties. Everyone, you are now cleared for mass hysteria. Still Down.!!!!!!! Still down. Rats. Any catastrophic event in Seattle? Could have been DoS’ed? (denial of service attack) This is what happens when you sell […]

Walt demands answers! Source: Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com Well, Walt Mossberg sure let Kevin Martin have it last night at the D: All Things Digital conference, blasting the FCC chairman over the glacial pace of broadband rollout in the U.S. “Not only do we have pathetic rates, but we pay more than most of these […]

…Or, “You CAN Get IM Working for You in the Workplace.” “r u there?”… Gaaah! Few things frustrate me more than someone who blissfully wastes my time when I’m trying to get work done. So I empathize with Chris Nerney, the capo over at our IT Management channel, who last week detailed the rationale behind […]

Source: Google Esquire magazine, not really known as a bastion of IT and Internet news, has a brief, intriguing interview with Vint Cerf, one of the pioneering luminaries in our industry and a hero of mine. Cerf (full name: Dr. Vinton G. Cerf) is, of course, the co-originator of the TCP/IP protocols and by extension, […]

A story from our West Coast bureau chief, David Needle, got me taking a brief stroll down memory lane. Dave had written last week about distractions — the bane of getting things done (in both the traditional and the David Allen, initial-caps sense — and how they plague the modern information worker. There’s discussion of […]