Google’s Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for a lot of people – including Google corporate.

Google has told the SEC that its billion-dollar acquisition of 5% of AOL, made in 2005 to prevent Microsoft from doing it and giving AOL a $20 billion over-the-top valuation, “may be impaired,” accounting-speak for it ain’t worth what it was (if it ever was).

Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.

SuccessFactors announced the delivery of five new capabilities integrated with the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration products and other tools. The integration of SuccessFactors Performance and Talent Management suite with the products from Google enables companies of...

The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen Sunday and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative. (Cuil didn’t turn up in its own search.)

Some little birds whispered in the Wall Street Journal’s ear and got it to report that Google, which usually just buys start-ups, now wants to set up a venture arm a la Intel Capital, leaving the reader to imagine where the money would go, what stage companies might catch its eye and w...

Salesforce.com, which has already linked its CRM software to Google Apps and integrated AdWords tracking into its platform, is deploying a free new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs so third-party developers can interact with data in Google services. The toolkit is supposed to bri...

Google is currently the pet of the American consumer. Although many in the industry don't find it particularly likeable, the company's reputation is tops among US consumers, based largely on how it treats employees and a perception of social responsibility, according to a Harris poll, ...

Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix...

Microsoft earned $4.3 billion on revenues of $15.84 billion, up 18%, in its fourth fiscal quarter in June, making it a $60 billion company - compliments of emerging markets and demand for Windows Server 2008. It had better-than-expected Vista sales this time through, up to $4.37 billio...

After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people...

Adobe says it's going to 'dramatically improve' the search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs) for Google and Yahoo by giving them optimized Flash Player technology. This new widgetry, which will read and index SWF files, is supposed to uncover informat...

A New York federal judge has ordered Google to turn YouTube user data over to Viacom's outside counsel so Viacom, which is suing YouTube for upwards of a billion dollars in damages, can prove YouTube users are watching copyrighted videos. That's every YouTube username, associated IP ad...

The Justice Department has reportedly opened a formal antitrust investigation of the multimillion-dollar Microsoft-escaping deal for Google to provide advertising to Yahoo's search engine, with a demand for documents going out to other than the immediate parties, not just the voluntary...

A little Chicago ISV called LimitNone is suing Google for nigh on to a billion dollar charging it with misappropriating its trade secrets to beat back Microsoft Office. Seems a year ago March LimitNone shared its mojo for migrating Outlook users and their calendars and contacts to Gmai...

Android, due in the second half, could reportedly be delayed until Q4 or maybe even next year, according to the tale the Wall Street Journal tells, a situation that opens up a can of worms for Google. Google has to prove that it's more than a one-trick pony and that it can deliver some...

Nokia wants to buy the 52% of the Symbian operating system that it doesn't already own to open source it and set it free. It's a defense against advances into the fragmented mobile space that Nokia and Symbian dominate - particularly - from the looks of case - against Google's nascent ...

Project Insight has released Project Scorecard, a project scoring system that enables companies to measure projects on how they fit into corporate goals and objectives. With the recent economic downturn, businesses are hard-pressed to prioritize major projects and determine whether or ...

The two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo in Delaware to invalidate its severance plan 'poison pill' have been denied the expedited trial that they asked for ahead of the August 1 stockholders meeting. The plan is supposed to incentivize Google staff to leave if an acquisition were to ...

After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million in annual revenues. The deal is non-exclusi...

Citrix has bought sepago GmbH's sepagoProfile software so user profiles in XenDesktop, XenApp and Provisioning Server are integrated. Terms were not disclosed but as part of the deal the Cologne-based sepago will continue developing the product for virtualizing application provisioning...

ComScore has upped Google's US search share. It was 59.8% in March and now for April it's 61.6%. It gave Yahoo 20.4% and Microsoft 9.1%. HP and Foxconn International, a unit of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the big contract manufacturer, are building a $50 million factory ou...

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown ...

Google has opened up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process locks them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for t...

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have re...

Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 is out. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, ...

Facebook, the social networking site that Microsoft owns a pricey sliver of, says it's going to open source its year-old Facebook Platform so it's easier for developers to build applications on it. It's reportedly calling the effort fbOpen and the move puts it on a collision course wit...

In the largest third-party win yet for the year-old Google Gears, as well as a win for the browser-as-a-platform, they say, News Corp's MySpace social networking site has used the Google widgetry to upgrade its mail so users can search and sort their mail in real-time. The MySpace news...

As soon as Google announced the availability of browser-based Google Earth functionality, GIS Planning's development team jumped on the opportunity to integrate the application into their existing Google Maps-powered services. In doing so, GIS Planning became one of the first developer...

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for th...

Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be available later this week. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep common AJAX headaches l...

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, includ...

Office will support the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1 format when Office 2007 Service Pack 2 arrives in the first half of 2009. Microsoft said users will be able to open, edit and save documents in ODF from directly inside Office application without having to install any other code. T...

Google co-founder and billionaire Larry Page in Washington to speak at the think tank where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is chairman of the board - and apparently meet with government officials too - claimed that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would 'monopolize online communications, stifle innov...

Parallels said Wednesday that its Desktop virtualization widgetry for the Mac, which lets Intel-based Apples run Windows or Linux along with Mac OS X, has sold more than a million copies, a nice chunk of the Macs out there. It is the largest-selling Mac utility and gives Mac users acce...

Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It says Dell OptiPlex desktop are down nearly 50...

Zoho is gonna try rustling some of Google's prized Apps users. It's designed a unified login to encourage Google and Yahoo visitors to try Zoho applications using the user names and passwords they use with their Google and Yahoo accounts.

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the 'next IBM' and why Google is not the 'next Microsoft' - there are significant qualitative diffe...

Microsoft issued a short, murky statement Sunday afternoon saying it has suggested a limited alignment with Yahoo. It does not explain its proposal. Perhaps it's thinking along the lines of the deal Yahoo is supposed to be negotiating with Google, perhaps a partial acquisition (perhaps...

Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its first major open source ISV - and a key one f...