RIM collapsing as Apple iPhone wins the enterprise
As speculation turns to iPhone 5 comes news that Research In Motion (RIM) is dead. Sure, this might sound harsh but the company's move to replace its leadership seems unlikely to bring it back from the brink. Apple [AAPL] has unleashed forces RIM has been unable to match.
Fall of the giant
What’s the news? Company co-CEO's, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have stepped down. RIM now has a new CEO, ex-COO, Thorsten Heins. The fightback -- such as it is -- begins with two new model phones scheduled for introduction later this year, hopefully.
These moves reflect declining BlackBerry sales, declining satisfaction levels, decline across the board at the world's once leading smartphone company.
Think back and you'll recall a time when RIM devices seemed to exude rubber-clad cool: if you didn't have a BlackBerry you wanted one, and business users who did possess them loved them so much they'd work in bed with them, creating armies of BlackBerry widows in the process.
Apple made your widows smile
Apple's focus on users meant those BlackBerry widows ended up with their own electronic gadget to use at bedtime, and when their business-focused husbands saw what they were doing, they wanted a little iAction too. Read more...
Tech giants back standard for cloud portability
Among the allures of cloud computing is the promise of easily and seamlessly moving services from one cloud to another. Realizing that kind of portability, however, is difficult. Every cloud service has its own distinct requirements, such as security, governance, and compliance, as well its constituent parts, including Web server, database, storage, and networking requirements.
In an effort to make cloud service more portable, a group of tech giants that includes IBM, Cisco, EMC, CA, SAP, and Red Hat today unveiled the first draft of open interoperability specification called TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). Capgemini, Citrix, NetApp, PwC, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2, among others, are also contributors.
TOSCA aims to let companies create interoperable descriptions -- in a sense, templates -- of their application and infrastructure services, the relationships between the parts of the service, and the operational behavior of the services. The open nature of the standard is intended to ensure service interoperability, regardless of supplier, provider, or host technology. Read more...
Microsoft’s new employee motivational tool — more cash, less stock
Once upon a time, Microsoft employees made millions from the stock they were given, because of the company's constantly escalating stock price. Those days are long behind us. Microsoft has just recognized that getting company stock is no longer a motivation, and has instead shifted employee compensation towards cold, hard cash. It's a smart move.
Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft has overhauled its entire employee review system. It's a top-to-bottom change, including the way in which employees are rated annually.
But likely the most important part of the change is found in this paragraph of the memo Steve Ballmer sent out to company employees. Here's the excerpt taken from the full memo as reported on Foley's blog:
For all employees, we will shift a portion of stock award targets into base salary, providing more cash up front and obvious incremental employee value. Senior leaders will continue to have a large portion of their overall compensation in stock to ensure their compensation is heavily tied to the financial performance of the company. Read more...