IBM rises again as its stock passes a declining Microsoft
Hot on the heels of Apple passing Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable business in the world, there's another shakeup at a slightly lower level. IBM is the second-largest tech company by market cap...
Can a marriage of AOL and Yahoo save the fading Web titans?
According to Bloomberg and its ubiquitous "people familiar with the matter," AOL might be jonesing for a merger with boss-less 'net titan Yahoo.
The two companies already share an advisor firm in Allen & Co, making...
Bartz is out: will Ballmer come after Yahoo again? (Updated: sale time?)
Update: Yahoo's board is exploring the possibility of a sale, according to the Wall Street Journal's even-popular persons familiar with the matter. The reeling Internet giant is said to be in the process of hiring...
Bartz is out: will Ballmer come back to Yahoo?
When Carol Bartz took the helm at Yahoo! in 2009, she promised a "back to the basics" approach. Three years later, the company is truly back to square one—as in looking for a new leader...
When founders leave: lessons for Apple from Microsoft, Intel, and Sun
The Internet is crawling with Jobs reports today. Nearly every news aggregator puts Apple's new leadership situation ahead of hurricane Irene evacuations. (Though always-classy AOL promotes the 10-year anniversary of Aaliya...
Does Apotheker need an apothecary? Why HP is exiting the PC business
One of our favorite acronyms is ditching another one: Hewlett-Packard wants to spin off its personal computers division in a dramatic move. Whatever the means—spin-off, direct sale, or "other transaction"—HP is ...
What Google lost—and gained—by not buying Motorola in 2010
Google just plunked down $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility. Would the deal have been cheaper if Big G had just purchased a handset maker back in January 2010 rather than launching the ill-fated Nexus One instead?
To figure tha...
Which company is biggest? A primer on corporate valuation
Update: When the markets closed on August 10, 2011, Apple ended up as the company with the largest market capitalization in the world ($337.17 billion), surpassing Exxon Mobil ($330.88 billion). This generated a new flurry of dis...
Doing the math on News Corp.’s disastrous MySpace years
Once upon a time, MySpace was the king and pioneer of social networking. When Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the company for $580 million, it looked like a steal. Surely MySpace must be worth billions...
Feature: Does this metric make my company look big?
So the order came down from the Orbiting HQ, and I'm here to make it happen:
Make people a little more smarter than "DURR HUGE MARKET CAP DURRR!"
The data that follows was culled from Capital IQ, a division of Standard...
Feature: Making music in Linux and beyond
You can do a lot with free open-source software, also known as FOSS. Musicians with a yen for Linux are in luck; the array of choices for creating, editing, producing, and publishing music using nothing but FOSS software is...
Doing science: Jonathan Coulton to create music for Portal 2
Portal was something of a perfect storm. Game mechanics that felt new, a story that tied into the world of Half-Life, a length that didn't outstay its own welcome, and to really drive the point home the end credits featured the instantly memorable song "Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton. The song...
