Good Morning Silicon Valley

Through its run-up to release, RIM’s BlackBerry Storm had a lot of people rooting for it — RIM admirers, Verizon customers, touchscreen fans, smartphone aficionados — and the first hands-on reports were encouraging (see “BlackBerry Storm successfully weathers first round of reviews“). Now, on the eve the launch, the full reviews are coming in, and [...]

Google is big enough and rich enough that it can afford exploratory missions into new territory on the chance that treasures await. But you don’t stay big and rich for long, especially in this economic environment, unless you abide by the First Rule of Holes, which is, “If you’re in one, stop digging.” So it [...]

In the early ’90’s, when it became clear that I, an Amiga user at the time, would need to buy and learn a PC for work-related reasons, I shifted into my immersion mode of knowledge acquisition, which consisted of reading everything current that I could get my hands on and gradually increasing the percentage that [...]

What exactly were these Yahoo investors expecting? That immediately upon the announcement of Jerry Yang’s decision to step down as CEO, Microsoft would do a quick 180 and come running back with a new offer to buy the company? Apparently that dream alone, and not any renewed confidence in Yahoo’s independent prospects, fueled Tuesday’s run-up [...]

Here’s good news for anyone who appreciates the power of a still image. Google is in the process of putting the entire photographic archives of Life magazine online. That’s about 10 million photos, 97 percent of which have never been seen by the public. Most, says Google engineer Paco Galanes, “have been sitting in dusty [...]

If Yahoo is seeking any inspirational examples of a large tech company successfully surviving a wrenching change at the helm, it need look no farther than Hewlett-Packard, where the steady hand of Mark Hurd has been guiding the company out of the rubble of the Fiorina Era. While other tech firms have been taking turns [...]

There is, as you would expect, a ton of blogosphere chatter reacting to Jerry Yang’s announcement late Monday that he would be stepping down as Yahoo’s CEO, but the market today is saying all you really need to know. The initial burst of enthusiasm that sent the company’s market cap up by about $2 billion [...]

Not that you can ever let down your guard against the constant efforts by malware mavens to separate you from your cash or secretly seize control of your computer, but starting right about now, you might want to set your suspicion sensors on highest sensitivity through the holiday season. Traditionally there’s a surge in spam, [...]

Outspoken billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has blustered, laughed and shrugged his way through at least $1.5 million in fines from the NBA over the years, but dealing with a full court press by the Securities and Exchange Commission may be tougher. The SEC today charged Cuban with insider trading, citing [...]

Depending on your position, this is either a sign of the fast-approaching end times or a harbinger of consumer nirvana — the latter if your position is slumped deep in your sofa in front of a large screen. TiVo is now giving its broadband-connected customers the ability to order a pizza from Domino’s with a [...]

A few news nuggets from the wide world of science:
* Since 1995, planets outside our solar system have been observed only indirectly, spotted by detecting the slight wobble they cause in the stars they orbit. Now, for the first time, researchers have taken some direct snapshots — one team using the Hubble Space Telescope and [...]

In a move that some of its retail partners may find disquieting, Microsoft has finally opened an online store for U.S. customers. As with its outlets in the U.K., Germany and South Korea, the store will sell packaged goods from Access to Zunes, but it’s really pushing product downloads with an appeal to the impatient [...]

From the first sentence of the press release, you almost thought they were announcing good news: “Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced a series of changes designed to align its cost model with the global economic climate and accelerate the introduction of compelling open source innovations.” But then came “As part of this effort, Sun is [...]

In homage to the positive attitude of the fellow who when confronted by a room filled with horse manure concluded, “There must be a pony in here somewhere,” I will attempt to leaven today’s litany of bad news with some good.
* Bad news: Things in the chip industry look a lot bleaker than they did [...]

Now that you’ve spread a wealth of information across myriad Web 2.0 social sites and services, Microsoft figures what you really need is a centralized command and control center, and that’s the vision it’s rolling out today. Under the umbrella of Microsoft Live, Redmond is hoping to leverage the hundreds of millions of Hotmail and [...]