Trevor Floyd

All right, Microsoft, 'fess up: How many takes did you need for your video of Samsung Intrepid's TellMe feature, which sends text messages and searches the Web by voice, to go smoothly? One that, given some of the things we've heard about Windows Mobile 6.5 in general, is particularly worthy of praise. Because honestly, it's a pretty impressive feature.

See, voice dialing has never really excited me. Using voice to replace typing, however, can be more convenient in more scenarios. It's useful for those occasions when your hands are busy, but anyone comfortable with their phone can generally get to a number easily with buttons. Here's how it works: The Sprint Intrepid has a dedicated button for the TellMe feature. Then, you can just dictate your message, and the phone will transcribe it.

Press it, and you can start a text message by saying "text" and the contact's name. You are, of course, able to check it before sending the message. I'm aware that the Google Mobile app for Blackberry, Android, and the iPhone also lets you search the Web by voice (and it's fairly accurate, too), but the difference with the Intrepid is hardware. The search function is even easier, as you can just say what you're looking for, and in one step the phone initiates a Bing search. Even on the iPhone, you've still got to slide out of the phone's lock system or get out of whatever app you're using, find the Google Mobile app, and then lift the phone to your ear to start a voice search. Indeed, I'd like to see other phone-makers (ahem, Apple) extend their phones' voice dialers to include these functions.

By fusing TellMe's voice features to a dedicated button on the hardware, Microsoft and Samsung make texting and searching much easier. Wait, did I just say other tech companies should copy Microsoft? I must be in the Bizarro world.

Startup Cloudera is introducing a set of applications on Friday for working with Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing and analysis. It allows an application workload to be spread over clusters of commodity hardware, and also includes a distributed file system. Cloudera, which provides Hadoop support to enterprises, developed the new browser-based application suite to simplify the process of using Hadoop, according to CEO Mike Olson. "It's an easy-to-use GUI suitable for people who don't have a lot of Hadoop expertise," Olson said. "The big Web properties with sophisticated and talented PhDs have been successful [with it], but ordinary IT shops ... have had a harder time." Hadoop is known for its behind-the-scenes role crunching oceans of information for Web operations like Facebook and Yahoo. But although the technology is "at its best" when data volumes get into multiple terabytes, Hadoop has relevance for a wide variety of companies, according to Olson. "It's increasingly easy to get your hands on that much data these days," especially from machine-generated information like Web logs, he said.

Cloudera and its partners are fine-tuning the suite, which is now in beta, before issuing a general release. The browser-based application set is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux, and includes four modules: a file browser; a tool for creating, executing and archiving jobs; a tool for monitoring the status of jobs; and a "cluster health dashboard" for keeping tabs on a cluster's performance. Hadoop needs many more tools like it, according to analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. "If Hadoop is to consistently handle workloads as diverse and demanding as those of [massively parallel processing] relational DBMSes, it needs a lot of tools and infrastructure," Monash said via e-mail. "The three leaders in developing those are Yahoo, Cloudera, and Facebook. There's a long way to go."

As 2009 winds down, are you having trouble remembering exactly what you spent the past year doing? Anyway, if you'd like a bit of a jumpstart to the old memory, Apple's posted a feature called iTunes Rewind 2009 on the iTunes Store, recapping the best music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and apps of 2009. Music As you might expect, Michael Jackson gets prominent billing-the iTunes staff has picked him as the artist of the year. That happens to me sometimes: for example, it only started snowing on the east coast this week, and already I can't remember ever being warm.

Kings of Leon's Only By the Night took top album of the year, and best new artist went to the seemingly omni-present Lady GaGa. iTunes also doled out the same awards to each genre of music it sells in the store, so if you're itching for the best in hip-hop, jazz, or western, take a look. The list of top sales and rentals in the store was topped by-duh-Twilight, surprise second-placer Pineapple Express, and Quantum of Solace (Star Trek placed fifth, though it's only been out for a few weeks). TV shows Television, now, that's my bailiwick. There's also a list of the top-selling songs of 2009-and strangely enough, I own not a single one of them: "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas took the number one spot, followed by Flo Rida's "Right Round," and Lady GaGa's "Poker Face". Movies The movies section features twelve top titles, including Pixar's Up, J.J. Abrams's Star Trek and indie titles like (500) Days of Summer and Sunshine Cleaning. iTunes pimped Fox's freshman comedy Glee for the best season in that category, with the top episode going to an installment of 30 Rock. The store also breaks out a number of other categories-I was pleased to see Dollhouse's unaired "Epitaph One" taking the top episode for sci-fi.

Drama saw an AMC sweep with sophomore series Breaking Bad taking best season and Mad Men's pivotal "The Gypsy and the Hobo" nabbing best episode. The top-selling season list was headed by Mad Men's third season, and followed by Lost's season five, and 24 season seven. Apps Meanwhile, in apps, iTunes made a distinction between the year's best and best-selling apps and games. Top-selling episodes were headlined by Family Guy, Gossip Girl, and Lost. Best game awards went to Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Real Racing, and Zenonia, among others, while top sellers included The Sims 3, The Oregon Trail, and the apparently Teflon Tiger Woods PGA Tour.

Free apps were apparently not recognized, however. Best apps, on the other hand, were headlined by titles like CBS Sports: Live College Games, Convertbot, and Leaf Trombone: World Stage, while the top-selling apps included MLB.com At Bat, QuickOffice Mobile Office Suite, and SlingPlayer Mobile. Audiobooks In the audiobooks category, the best of the year included fiction titles like The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Under the Dome by Stephen King, and Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (which, incidentally, I just finished in dead-tree format and can't recommend enough). The non-fiction list was topped by Dave Cullen's Columbine, Thomas E. Ricks's The Gamble, and Tracy Morgan's I Am the New Black. Philosophy. On the best-seller side, William P. Young's The Shack amazingly edged out all four Twilight books slavering at its heels to take the fiction side, while Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture topped the non-fiction section, followed by Sun Tzu's unabridged The Art of War and The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Podcasts Finally, the best in podcasts was topped by The Adam Carolla Podcast for this year in audio, CNBC's The Suze Orman Show for this year in video, This American Life for "classic" audio, and The Onion News Network for "classic" video.

Except, of course, the actually important things. And that's it for Apple's 2009 year in review: everything you need to remember about this year compiled in a series of helpful lists of media. For that, we recommend shutting down your copy of iTunes, firing up your copy of iPhoto and browsing through the last year of photos for some real memories.

Among Microsoft's trials and tribulations in the mergers and acquisitions space, a Microsoft official on Tuesday evening cited fear of dealing with the company as an obstacle Microsoft has had to overcome. Brown made the comments at a Churchill Club event in Mountain View, Calif., during a panel discussion on mergers and acquisitions that also featured representatives from Cisco, Google, and Accel Partners. [ Microsoft and Yahoo recently agreed to partner in an effort to better compete with Google. | Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter. ] After the event, Brown said he was referring to a time when he started at the company years ago.  In general, people were just scared of Microsoft, he said. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 "[For a while] there was a fear of dealing with Microsoft and we've worked really hard to try to overcome that," said Marc Brown, managing director of corporate development at Microsoft. This fear existed with both the entrepreneurial and venture capital communities, said Brown. The three technology companies represented on the panel have made waves over the years with their acquisitions.  Cisco is known for numerous purchases, ranging from Scientific Atlanta to Grand Junction Networks; Microsoft has acquired companies such as Great Plains Software and attempted to buy Yahoo, while Google bought YouTube and others.

Panelists discussed their companies' mergers and acquisitions strategies. "The M&A and acquisitions strategy's pretty straightforward," Brown said. "We are a technology buyer. Panel moderator Steve Smith, senior managing partner with Arma Partners, noted Microsoft actually began with an acquisition. "[Founder Bill] Gates bought PC DOS for something under $100,000 and turned it into a thing called Windows and a company called Microsoft," Smith said. Most of our acquisitions are of earlier-stage companies."  Microsoft then leverages sales and distribution channels and processes to bring acquired technologies to the widest audience possible, he said. "What I would say is M&A  is not really the strategy. We start with the idea of what should be our growth strategy," said Carmel. M&A is the tool," said Charles Carmel, vice president of corporate development for Cisco. "The strategy is really about capturing innovation." Cisco realizes it does not have a monopoly on good ideas, he said. "We don't start with the idea of what company we should buy. When pondering an acquisition, Google looks at the caliber of leadership being brought over to the company from the acquired venture, along with factors including time to market and opening of new markets, said David Lawee, Google vice president of corporate development.

Panelists also cited increasing interest in potential overseas acquisitions in places such as China. "There's nothing to prevent us from being as aggressive internationally," Lawee said. The company's acquisition of Urchin resulted in the Google Analytics platform while Keyhole, also bought by Google, became Google Earth, Lawee said. But panelists declined to make any predictions when asked whether the European Union should approve the planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Tuesday's event was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices. They also would not discuss what impact this acquisition would have on their own businesses. "Everybody's got their own twists and turns to their M&A activities," Carmel said. "No comment," Brown added. This story, "Fear of Microsoft subsides in mergers and acquisitions arena," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

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Virtualization and cloud computing has taken off, despite strong concerns lingering over how companies can secure and manage those apps and data. Over the next year, Novell plans to release eight new products or upgrades to aid in what it calls "intelligent workload management." The upcoming Novell Identity Manager 4 will add the new ability for IT managers embed identity management and other security features into both Web-hosted and virtualized apps, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said in an interview last week. Novell Inc. says it can help companies with both sides of the equation, accelerating the creation of virtualized and cloud apps with built-in security.

Novell Identity Manager 4 will arrive by the middle of next year. These will work closely with a Novell's Suse Appliance Toolkit, which is due in the first quarter next year. That will work closely with Novell Cloud Security Service, also due in 2010, in order to extend identity and security policies onto apps and data hosted in the cloud. The Toolkit helps ISVs and large enterprises quickly build and deploy virtualized appliances, i.e. self-contained apps prepackaged with a thin operating system layer that can be moved from server to cloud-based server without crash or conflict. The most popular is a DIY version of the Chrome OS built with Google 's browser running on Novell's OpenSUSE Linux.

Hovsepian said customers are already starting to use Novell's existing generation of virtual appliance building tools in a major way. "In the last three months, we've had 40,000 registered users come into our system and build 100,000 different virtualized appliances and workloads," Hovsepian said. Hovsepian said that virtual appliance has been downloaded 750,000 times. Gerry Gebel, an analyst with the Burton Group, agreed, saying that other leading players in the identity management and security space, including CA Inc., IBM Corp. and Oracle Inc., haven't laid out a comprehensive roadmap for virtualized and hosted management. "This is pretty significant," he said. "It's the kind of capability that more advanced organizations with large virtual environments are going to need, as they continually stop, start, reactivate and archive workloads." Companies who push forward on virtualization or cloud computing, or let their employees and departments do so, without setting up an identity management and security framework, are putting themselves in "real danger," Gebel said. "You can't dismiss security and identity management just because the computing model is changing. Novell is also upgrading its Platespin virtual management product so that users can use it as their single console for managing all of these workloads, whether they are run virtually or hosted in the cloud, Hovsepian said. "We are way ahead of everyone else," he said. It's no excuse," he said. Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc., said it will be a challenge for Novell to make all of its tools work together elegantly. "A lot of moving parts and the trick is to get everything glued together in a coherent way," Haff said. "I also don't see it as fundamentally different from what other vendors are doing, whether it is VMware, IBM, Citrix, or Microsoft ."

Gebel said Novell has the technical goods to back up its marketing push, citing a demonstration of the beta for Novell Identity Manager 4, which he said was "pretty impressive." "The integration with the virtualization and cloud workloads looked like it was working well," he said.

Ethernet switch vendor Extreme Networks is replacing its CEO and laying off 70 employees in an effort to quickly improve the company's bottom line and set it up to run profitably with lower revenues. Canepa receives $639,354 severance. CEO Mark Canepa, who took the position in 2006, has resigned, but will remain for a short period to help recently hired CFO Bob Corey transition to Acting CEO. The company is seeking a permanent replacement.

As part of the restructuring, the company also eliminated the job of chief counsel, getting rid of Robert Schlossman, and replacing him with Vice Presideint Diane Honda, according to a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company didn't say where the 70 layoffs would come, but it represents about 9% of Extreme's workforce. Judging from the company Web site, the head of human resources and head software developer are also gone. Most Notable IT Layoffs of 2009  The moves will lower the company's expenses by $2.5 million per quarter, with the larger goal being to have the company break even if it makes $70 million per quarter. The company hasn't reported its financial statement for the quarter ended Sept. 27, but it said earlier this month that it expected to come up $14.4 million shy of what Wall Street analysts forecasted. The measures will cost the company a one-time $4.2 million hit.

The analysts projected Extreme would take in $66 million but the actual revenues will be more like $80.4 million, the company said. The company's stock prices hit a low of close to a dollar in March, struggled back to just over $3 last month then dipped to about $2.25 over the past weeks. "They're in a tough spot," says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee group. "This is a company that's truly having a hard time finding its way." He says the company is smaller than its main competitors, HP, IBM, Cisco, Juniper and Brocade (which has reportedly put itself up for sale).  Extreme makes a range of switches from edge, to aggregation to core, as well as wireless switches and security gear. A the time Canepa blamed the company's North American business as being particularly soft because some deals it had hoped for fell through and others were delayed beyond the end of the quarter. The company burst onto the networking scene in the mid-1990s as one in a pack of Gigabit Ethernet and Layer 3 switching pioneers and differentiated itself, among other ways, by uniquely packaging its technology in purple boxes.  "When you look at all the network vendors out there, what problem is it that Extreme is trying to solve that isn't being solved by somebody else?" Kerravala says. "If you look at data centers, all the emphasis is on converged fabric, and they just don't have a roadmap to get there. They'll get smaller and smaller and continue to exist off their installed base until their assets get acquired by somebody else." Insiders and channel partners said the firm seemed to be too focused on long range strategic planning instead of trying to figure out how to survive the dire economy.

I think they'll go the route of Enterasys. Extreme's Chairman of the Board Gordon Stitt said in a written statement: "Management and the Board decided to take this action to streamline our operations, reduce our breakeven and create an operating model that will position Extreme Networks for sustained profitability as quickly as possible. We remain committed to the products, markets, channels and customers and to continuing to introduce new and innovative products." These reductions have been taken across the entire organization.

This won't be a long post so I'm going to make you wait until the end before revealing the sum of money this plaintiff wants to extract from Gartner because Gartner had the audacity to relegate its software to "niche player" status in the firm's legendary "Magic Quadrant." (Opinion) On Friday, a judge in San Jose will hear arguments regarding Gartner's motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed in May by ZL Technologies that seeks to not only eviscerate the Magic Quadrant but also punish Gartner severely for ever having foisted it upon the IT world. (That some of you are cheering grants ZL's case not a scintilla of validity, but point taken.) Having spent too much of my day reading four separate documents filed in the case, allow me to simplify the arguments: San Jose-based ZL Technologies accuses Gartner of "defamation, trade libel, false advertising, unfair competition, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage." All of these purported wrongs allegedly arose from the decision of Gartner analyst Carolyn DiCenzo to place ZL's e-mail archiving software in the "niche" corner of the Magic Quadrant - along with other niche players (in this market) such as IBM, HP and EMC - instead of in the "market leaders" quadrant with the likes of market leader Symantec. You can read the original complaint here. ZL takes wounded exception to the fact that Gartner considers such squishy criteria as vision and marketing ability when determining quadrant placement.

Gartner responds that it is known far and wide among IT professionals as a purveyor of expert opinion - "views" is the word it emphasizes to the court - that are designed to facilitate technology purchasing decisions. In a follow-up filing, ZL sputters and spews that Gartner cannot be allowed to claim First Amendment protections because … well, well … I'm sorry, but it doesn't even warrant a summarization. Gartner's reports - including the Magic Quadrants - amount to nothing more or less than protected free speech, the company argues here. You can read it here. And, whatever one may think of Gartner's judgment - in this case, or any other - it isn't actionable as long as First Amendment law rules.

Gartner's response to that response demonstrates why lawyers get paid more than trade-press pundits, in that the company's attorneys manage to maintain their composure and point out yet one more time that ZL isn't really complaining about anything more than Gartner's judgment. You can read that reply here. Try $132 million, "and" - emphasis mine - "that such damages be trebled." They want $396 million? … That's not a judgment request, it's an exit strategy. OK, so how much does ZL want for having been so maligned and mistreated? But, wait, there's more.

They want attorneys' fees, too, naturally. ZL wants the judge to order Gartner to fund an advertising campaign to "correct any misperceptions resulting from Gartner's unlawful acts," and "disgorge all profits" derived from said acts. Done? Oh, not by a long-shot: ZL wants the court to impose "punitive damages … in the amount of $1,300,000,000." Sell it to the judge.