Microsoft’s period of congenial cooperation could be over
A couple of years ago while a guest of Marc Benioff onstage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce customer conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that seemed to signal a new period of amicable cooperation for his company. Several pieces of evidence seem to suggest that the period of friendly cooperation that was in full bloom in 2015 could be over, and not just with Salesforce. Read More

Dropbox announced a couple of products today to make it easier for Autodesk users to access and share large design files. The products include an integrated desktop app for opening and saving Autodesk files stored in Dropbox and an app for viewing design files without the need for owning Autodesk. These products are long overdue given that Dropbox’s Ross Piper, who is head of ecosystem…
Cloud Spanner, Google’s globally distributed cloud database got an update today that includes multi-region support, meaning the database can be replicated across regions for lower latency and better performance. It also got an updated Service Level Agreement (SLA) that should please customers. The latter states Cloud Spanner databases will have 99.999% (five nines) availability, a level…
You’ve probably spent a lot of time keeping track of your plants and all the minor details, like the coloration of the leaves, in order to make sure they’re healthy — but for professional growers in greenhouses, this means keeping track of thousands of plants all at once. That can get out of hand really quickly as it could involve just walking through a greenhouse with an…
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today that 36 members have agreed to a set of certification standards for Kubernetes, the immensely popular open source container orchestration tool. This should make it easy for users to move from one version to another without worry, while ensuring that containers under Kubernetes management will behave in a predictable way. The group of…
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today that 36 members have agreed to a set of certification standards for Kubernetes, the immensely popular open source container orchestration tool. This should make it easy for users to move from one version to another without worry, while ensuring that containers under Kubernetes management will behave in a predictable way. The group of…
While some of the largest chip manufacturers are looking to shift their focus onto the GPU for their biggest machine learnings, there’s a blooming ecosystem of new chip startups looking to rethink the way processing for AI works That includes a European-based startup called Graphcore, which said today that it has raised $50 million in new financing led by Sequoia Capital. Graphcore,…
IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months. A qubit is a single unit of quantum information. The company also announced that IBM researchers had successfully built a 50 qubit…
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the launch of a number of open source foundations like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation and others. Most of these run under the Linux Foundation, but one of the largest open source foundation outside of that group’s orbit is the OpenStack Foundation, which — at least until now — has solely focused on…
Dreamforce took place this week in San Francisco, that magical gathering of over more than 150,000 Salesforce faithful that happens every fall. While I didn’t attend in person this time, I was able to get the gist of what was going on through a combination of pre-briefs and live streams. Of course, nothing can pass for actually seeing how thoroughly Salesforce takes over the area…