A brutal, ruthless monopolist resorts to hardball tactics, including lawsuits, license revocations, and finally its multibillion-dollar acquisition power to kill off upstart rivals. Nope, it’s not Microsoft. Great piece by Ashlee Vance in today’s NY Times about IBM killing off threats to its incredibly lucrative mainframe monopoly. Will be interesting to see how IBM responds. [...]

Yes, the ultimate conquest is about to take place, as Sun launches a daring reverse takeover of IBM and completes its journey to rule the industry. This anyway is how I expect MLP might position the deal. Sure, IBM will try to describe it as buying up a weaker rival for a few billion dollars. [...]

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Check it out, people. My man Dan Frommer of Alley Insider is slowly gaining on his Apple-watching nemesis at AllThingsD, John Paczkowski. This morning at 7:16 a.m. PT, Paczkowski was the first to re-report the non-news coming out of some Chinese publication that Apple is preparing an oversized iPod Touch, aka a netbook. Just nine [...]

A reliable source at Microsoft informs me that this Maybach parked in a handicapped space belongs to Salesforce.com CEO (and supposed student of Eastern religion) Marc Benioff. This happened at the Borg’s Silicon Valley campus where Benioff was attending a TechCrunch roundtable. Photo was snapped and Twittered by someone else at the show. See the [...]

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I just discovered this cool video on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Go check it out here. Guy takes random YouTube music clips and combines them into a mashup. Brilliant.

To save you the trouble of reading them all, here are the highlights. Palm earnings suck. See AllThingsD, or for a vastly different take, AlleyInsider.  Amazon does a Kindle app for iPhone. See AllThingsD, TechCrunch, or VentureBeat. A bigshot is leaving MySpace. See AllThingsD (6:15 p.m . ET last night), Alley Insider (6:25 p.m. ET, a full ten minutes [...]

I wrote recently about how the economics of blogging kind of sucks. But I neglected to mention the fine contribution to journalism and world knowledge that blogs represent. One of the great things about the blogosphere is the unique information that each blog provides. For example, today Apple announced some new machines. In the old [...]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bt9xBuGWgw&hl=en&fs=1] Got this today from a fellow filthy hack who is wasting away at one of the world’s leading business magazines and apparently didn’t have a deadline to meet today. Much love, my underutilized comrade.