Informationweek Influencer

Larry Dignan (@ldignan)

Twitter Bio:: Editor in Chief, ZDNet, Smart Planet; Editorial Director, TechRepublic
Location:: New York
Website:: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/

What is This?

Larry Dignan's

Network

Larry Dignan's Selections From the Web

Netflix's lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck

|5 Influencers

Before he angered customers by raising prices, before he became the butt of Saturday Night Live satire for his Qwikster schemes, Netflix CEO Red Hastings alienated some of his key executives. Influential voices at the company departed just before Netflix embarked on a doomed attempt to spinoff DVD operations.

In the spring of 2011, Hastings, Netflix's widely admired chief executive, held a meeting with his management team and outlined his blueprint to jettison Netflix's DVD operations. Netflix managers would tell subscribers on July 12 that they planned to do away with a popular subscription that offered access

Pabst CIO Ben Haines brewing cloud first IT

|5 Influencers

Pabst Brewing Co. has been around since 1844 in some form and now is a marketing juggernaut with brands such as Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee and Stroh's. Today, Pabst contracts out its brewing so it can focus on the marketing and 600 distributors and is tossing out its legacy information technology infrastructure as fast as it can.

In other words, Pabst's virtual brewing approach has propelled it to be the largest independent brewer. How? Pabst marketed its PBR brand heavily and become a college and hipster staple between 2005 and 2010. In May 2010, Pabst was taken private by investor C. Dean Metropolous and the mandate

Why does the IT industry continue to listen to Gartner?

|3 Influencers

Summary: Another day, another provocative research report from Gartner, which has a long track record of spectacularly wrong predictions. I've collected some of their greatest hits. Er, misses.

Gartner is getting more than its fair share of attention today for a controversial series of blog posts on Windows 8 from research director Gunnar Berger, who argues that the Windows 8 experience will be âbadâ on a non-touch-enabled device.

I have one question. Why does anyone pay attention to

Inside Intellectual Ventures, the most hated company in tech

|3 Influencers

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- To many in the high-tech business, a troll plots his schemes in a white office building on a hill in this leafy suburb of Seattle.

This is the home of Intellectual Ventures, which, depending on whom you ask, is either the biggest, most aggressive patent troll on the planet or a pioneering company that's helping inventors get their fair share.

The question of "whom you ask" is a big one, of course. Since it was founded in 2000 by Microsoft veterans Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intellectual Ventures has -- through $5 billion in investment funds and its own brainstorming efforts -- collected nearly 70,000

Moore's Law: The rule that really matters in tech

|2 Influencers

Year in, year out, Intel executive Mike Mayberry hears the same doomsday prediction: Moore's Law is going to run out of steam. Sometimes he even hears it from his own co-workers. But Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who 47 years ago predicted a steady, two-year cadence of chip improvements, keeps defying the pessimists because a brigade of materials scientists like Mayberry continue to find ways of stretching today's silicon transistor technology even as they dig into alternatives. (Such as, for instance, super-thin sheets of carbon graphene.) Oh, and don't forget the money that's driving that hunt for improvement. IDC

Yelp CEO: Yep, Google can be pretty evil

|2 Influencers

Jeremy Stoppelman, speaking during a Business Insider conference, adds that doing anything local takes depth and time. Stoppelman, speaking here today at a Business Insider conference, responded to a question from Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider deputy editor, about whether Google is evil. While he didn't straight out call the larger company the devil, he did say that Google has some evil business practices, such as ranking its reviews higher than those from competitors like Yelp. Stoppelman said that any disruptive businesses, like Uber and Airbnb, are guaranteed backlash, and government and business entities shouldn't necessarily be allowed

Microsoft's new Office: More strategic than Windows 8?

|2 Influencers

Microsoft is expected to take the wraps off of its latest Office and the product launch may be more strategically critical than Windows 8. Of course, you'd never know the role of Office 15 judging by the headlines. The numbers, however, tell a different tale.

As Mary Jo Foley noted, Office, which is likely to be known as Office 2013, has a few question marks. It's unclear how folks will get it. Functionality is an unknown---at least for those of us without a copy of the beta---and integration with Windows 8 will be interesting.