The Man Behind the Turnaround at Adobe; Shantanu Narayen has reshaped Adobe, helping to nearly double its stock price in two years, after a very public dispute with Apple’s Steve Jobs in 2010

SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 2013

The Turnaround Artist

By ALEXANDER EULE | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Shantanu Narayen has reshaped Adobe, helping to nearly double its stock price in two years, after a very public dispute with Apple’s Steve Jobs in 2010.

Shantanu Narayen tends to fly under the radar in Silicon Valley, so he was in uncharted waters when Steve Jobs dragged him and his company, Adobe Systems , into the headlines in 2010. The dispute centered around Flash, Adobe’s Web software standard for enabling video. In an open letter on Apple‘s website, Jobs blasted Flash as flawed technology. Narayen was left to defend his company, which once had a close partnership with Apple. Read more of this post

MediaTek has burst into the market for smartphone chips as the fourth biggest maker with around 10% market share; Domestic smartphone brands’ share in China has soared from 25% to 70% in the past two years, as the market has expanded more than fivefold

MediaTek has burst into the market for smartphone chips

Aug 24th 2013 | HSINCHU |From the print edition

TAIWAN has a paradoxical claim to fame. The island of 23m people is home to many leading information-technology companies—few of which are well known abroad. Most of the world’s personal computers are made by Quanta, Wistron or some other obscure Taiwanese firm, though they bear the names of Dell, HP or Lenovo. The processors in your smartphone or tablet may have been made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and its touch-screen by TPK. And, especially if your device is Chinese, there is a good and growing chance that the chips were designed by MediaTek. Read more of this post

VMware Killed the Past. Can It Claim the Future? The company that helped bring in cloud computing could become a tired relic or lead big business customers to a whole new kind of computing

AUGUST 24, 2013, 9:00 AM

VMware Killed the Past. Can It Claim the Future?

By QUENTIN HARDY

VMware is a 15-year-old tech company with a market capitalization of $36 billion. Next week, it will host 21,000 customers in San Francisco and will start to find out if that means it is young or old. “It’s a statement of our success how quickly we’ve become mainstream,” said Pat Gelsinger, the company’s chief executive. Now, however, he says, “we’re at the crossroads.” As what he calls “the last great company of the client-server generation,” VMware is going through much of the same transition to the world of cloud computing, big data, and mobility, that bedevils so many giants of the old tech world. Uniquely, the company has a legitimate claim to have helped destroy the software world in which it started. VMware’s main product, virtualization software, allows one computer server to do the work of many, and for complex tasks to be shared across several machines. That disrupted the old computer server business, and helped usher in the current model of big data centers and cloud computing. But now, as other companies offer both proprietary and open source virtualization, VMware has to move on from the world it helped destroy. Read more of this post

Designer headphones: Dr Dre’s creation of a market for costly cans may herald the return of true hi-fi; In America the company now has almost half the market for premium-priced cans, compared with 21% for Bose, a longer-established maker

Designer headphones: The sound of music

Dr Dre’s creation of a market for costly cans may herald the return of true hi-fi

Aug 24th 2013 |From the print edition

FOR decades the market for expensive headphones was mainly limited to hi-fi buffs. But now that the boxy stereo system in the corner of the bedroom is largely a thing of the past, and young music fans listen mostly on portable devices, headphones have become as much of a fashion statement as the music player itself. Among the first to spot the potential of this market was Dr Dre, an American rapper-cum-tycoon. In 2008 he and Jimmy Iovine, a record producer, launched their Beats range of headphones, to great success. They have all but created a new product category: premium-priced ($100-plus) cans whose sound quality is good enough, but which mainly sell on their brand image. Read more of this post