Stories by Andrew Birmingham

Predictably Samsung’s lawyers went the tonk yesterday in the New South Wales Federal Court, bringing an action against Apple to halt the sale of its iPhone 4S in Australia.

All year Facebook has marched relentlessly towards a valuation of $US100 billion dollars with little consideration of the madness this may speak to for the investor markets in dotcom 2.0.

Apple won its injunction against Samsung, delaying at least for several months and perhaps permanently the distribution of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in its current form in Australia. The permanence of the result comes from an earlier threat by Samsung to take its bat and ball and go home if it missed the key selling cycle around Christmas. The argument being that the world will have moved on too far without them.

Sometimes massive change arrives by millimetres. All of a sudden everything you understood about the world just flipped on its axis, and you never saw it coming. On that count, it wasn't Apple's iPad that first tipped the joint upside down. Instead it was iTunes: An easy, painless and friction free way to manage micropayments. Consumers just natively got it.

Facebook waited a very long time to release its iPad app.

That $76 billion cash pile currently gathering interest over at Cupertino -- well technically Nevada -- is about to get a whole lot heavier.

Steve Jobs died yesterday; you may have read that somewhere. Very quickly as the day progressed the story became less about Jobs and more about us. Speaks volumes really.

Being the Alpha Geek doesn’t necessarily mean you will thrive outside of your own discipline. The best IT managers ditch the tech talk and speak human when presenting to other executives on the management team.

On the Internet, no one can hear you scream. So scream a little louder. Simply building new systems and hoping your good reputation will carry you through is no guarantee of success.

This month our CIO became surplus to requirements: time to walk the big walk fella, and thanks for coming. His job will effectively cease to exist. So how did our unfortunate CIO cope with the news?

Microsoft is everywhere, and in my darker moments I can only wish them well. Common sense says that eventually the industry must suffer from having one such dominant force. But then again this is an industry that has always played by its own rules and which, when the rules don't fit, simply moves the goalposts.

Once, I spoke the unspeakable -- describing graphically in this column my company's myriad crimes against information technology.

Conniving, sharp eyed, sales sharks circle your every dollar every day, tracking weaknesses and operating on instincts formed deep within the reptilian stem in their brains.

Revolutions are noisy affairs, generating their own heat and publicity. Occasionally, though, it is the small incidents that herald the onset of great changes. We notice the waves, but not the ripples.

Companies these days say they want to be customer centric and customer focused, which suggests the question -- what were they before?