Stories by Shane O'Neill

A hot-button question lately in the rapidly-growing smartphone market: Can a company succeed at selling smartphones and tablets without owning the software and the hardware?

If you're old enough to remember the Cold War, you know what an arms race is. One side comes up with a new weapon, the other side matches it, and then the first comes back with something even bigger and so on and so on. That also describes the ongoing battle between computer users who value their privacy and the Web sites and their advertisers that don't.

Chances are Microsoft will not retaliate against Google's 12.5 billion purchase of Motorola by acquiring a phone maker of its own, say industry analysts, mainly because of the company's rich history developing and licensing software and building an ecosystem of hardware partners.

Ever since Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating last week, the global financial markets have been on a wild ride.

Enterprises planning a Windows OS migration are at a bit of a crossroads. There's a lot to consider.

We're all waiting to see if pending buyouts by AT&T (T-Mobile) and Microsoft (Skype) will succeed or fail, but many a tech deal over the past decade has been an epic fail. Let's take a look back at the worst murders and executions, er, I mean mergers and acquisitions in tech.

Research firm IDC has tallied up PC sales for the second quarter of 2011, and the news is not good for Windows.

At a time when Cloud computing services for productivity tools are gaining steam, you would think that desktop software like Office 2010 would be on a downslide.

The Boston Red Sox have many weapons to keep the team winning on the field: powerful hitters, a seasoned pitching rotation, and an experienced coaching staff.

Microsoft has presented the Windows 8 user interface and displayed various devices on which the next version of Windows will run.

After Microsoft acquired Skype earlier this month for $8.5 billion, most of the questions revolved around how Skype's IM, voice and video calling features will fit into Microsoft enterprise products such as Outlook and Lync.

The City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has never owned an Exchange server, but starting on Memorial Day it will roll out Exchange and Outlook e-mail for 2,700 of its workers.

How do you solve a problem like Apple and Google?

When it comes to deploying Microsoft Office alternatives such as Google Apps, Zoho or Lotus Symphony, enterprise IT managers are in a state of intense curiosity but are still not ready for widespread adoption, according to a new Forrester research report entitled "Market Update: Office Productivity Alternatives."

At first glance, Microsoft's whopping $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype may seem like a pure consumer play to bolster Windows Live, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Kinect -- or an extremely expensive way to prevent Google from gobbling up Skype first.