Robin Bloor
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Welcome to the Robin Bloor blog on IT-Director.com. Simply click on one of the links from the list below, or delve into the Archives for older material.
Is AV product testing corrupt?
I had a conversation a month or two ago with someone high up in one of the IT security companies. He was bemoaning the fact that his company's AV product had performed poorly in tests run by AV-Test.org. He was deeply suspicious of the results...
Robin Bloor | 9th August '07
iPhone, Therefore I Am (American?)
Apple has probably sold upwards of half a million iPhones in less than a week, selling out in most Apple stores and AT&T outlets in America within 4 days. An ensemble of eBay entrepreneurs bought and then on-sold about 4000 iPhones within the same...
Robin Bloor | 4th July '07
The Decline of AntiVirus and the Rise of Whitelisting
The recent acquisition of SecureWave by PatchLink was not so much an acquisition as a merger, with PatchLink being the senior partner. With 3400 customers it had about twice the customer base as SecureWave and it also had about twice the staff. The...
Robin Bloor | 26th June '07
Why Toshiba was zapped by the Blu-Ray
Stone beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and VHS beats Betamax. Those are the rules of the game that is played by consumer electronics companies everywhere. In a recent comment on Apple, I suggested that Apple is a consumer electronics company and...
Robin Bloor | 22nd June '07
Apple v Microsoft continued...
The Apple v Microsoft piece I wrote generated enough comments for me to want to provide further thoughts. Primarily I'll confine this to responding to Dale's posting, but also I'll add some words to the Apple Hardware v Software...
Robin Bloor | 21st June '07
Second Life Lines
I received an email recently in respect of the blog/article I wrote entitled Second Life: The Campaign For Real Life. It was from Chris Gayson and it read as follows:
Robin,
Disclosure-
Until very recently I was an AD with Ogilvy—the...
Robin Bloor | 19th June '07
TruViso: shaking up the Streaming market
The market for streaming software bloomed into existence when it spawned a whole series of start-ups, led by Apama (now part of Progress Software) and StreamBase. Larger companies including TIBCO, Avaya and BEA joined the fray either with their own...
Robin Bloor | 18th June '07
When will Apple Overtake Microsoft?
In a recent conversation with Dale Vile, CEO of Freeform Dynamics the rising UK analyst company, Dale questioned my expectation that Apple would eventually overhaul Microsoft to become the dominant force in PC computing. I understand Dale's...
Robin Bloor | 14th June '07
10 reasons why the Black Hats have us outgunned
Here they are:
The Black Hats form a well integrated community that shares knowledge effectively.
Should you, after months of research and effort, create an exploit that allows you to hack Windows or any other frequently used software product, you...
Robin Bloor | 12th June '07
IT Security and Cyberwarfare
You may or may not have picked up the news that Estonia came under cyber-attack in early May. Cyber attacks—usually consisting of multiple denial of service attacks—are pretty bloodless really. You don't see buildings reduced to piles of...
Robin Bloor | 11th June '07
The Slow Death of AV Technology
AV technology is gradually dying and being replaced by far more effective IT security technology based on whitelisting. You could view this as an inevitable development, given the horrible inadequacies of AV technology, or you might want to pin the...
Robin Bloor | 7th June '07
CA, Rolling Thunder and the Integration Platform
Something interesting and important is cooking at CA. We got the first whiff of it at CA World a few weeks ago. As far as I know, I was the only analyst there, so I guess this is an analyst scoop of a kind. I was there to give a presentation on SOA...
Robin Bloor | 7th May '07
Is Digg digging its own grave? or is DRM in deep trouble?
Late on May 1st, Kevin Rose, the founder and CEO of Digg.com, made the following blog posting:
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts...
In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as...
Robin Bloor | 3rd May '07
Second Life: The Campaign For Real Life!
I received an email yesterday from the IBM analyst relations which read:
We are evaluating various forms of communication that would be effective, but also enjoyable and a change of pace. Could you please take a few moments to tell me:
1) are you...
Robin Bloor | 1st May '07
Vista Sales Disappoint Microsoft And Cheer Apple
Not long after the release of Vista, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, claimed that Microsoft sold 20 million licenses of Vista in its first month of availability. If you read Gartner's recently released figures for sales in the PC market in the first...
Robin Bloor | 23rd April '07
AV Vendors embarrassed yet again
Polymorphic viruses are not new. The first polymorphic virus was written in 1990 by Mark Washburn. You'd think that the AV vendors with 16 years to prepare would have been able to do something effective to counter them and you'd think wrong. A...
Robin Bloor | 12th April '07
Is HP now the dominant IT vendor?
Mark Hurd charmed and dazzled 250 of the world's analysts at the HP analyst gathering in Boston this week. In 2007, HP will overtake IBM as the world's largest technology company (in terms of the last 4 quarter's revenues, it already has) and it's...
Robin Bloor | 29th March '07
AVID: Why it's over for the AntiVirus industry
You may not have heard the news yet, but there's a new whitelisting kid on the block - and it's not a small startup from Nowheresville, in Nova Scotia. It's one of the top three IT security vendors. The company is CA and the new product goes by the...
Robin Bloor | 22nd March '07
Apple v Omnifone Revisited
My recent posting about the Apple v Omnifone challenge was met with a mild dose of flame—that's what you get if you write about Apple (or Linux) in anything but a positive way. Thanks for the attention. Anyway, I was making a point, and it is...
Robin Bloor | 1st March '07
Is Apple's iTunes Monopoly About To Die?
The idea that a credible rival to iTunes could appear from nowhere and compete head-to-head with Apple (as Microsoft has clearly failed to do) seems far fetched to say the least. But never mind, it's happening. The company that is presumptuous...
Robin Bloor | 15th February '07
ChaCha: A threat to Google?
ChaCha.com is a new search engine and I've begun to believe that it could, given a fair wind, be a threat to Google—despite the fact that it's still only in beta. The idea that anything could directly compete with Google has been dismissed by...
Robin Bloor | 5th February '07
Why Anti-Virus Profiling is inadequate
There are two techniques that AV products use to try to spot viruses. I have dealt extensively with one of these—the use of signatures—in articles I've posted as part of the AVID (Anti-Virus Is Dead) campaign. Signatures are like...
Robin Bloor | 31st January '07
Rose By Any Other Names…
Rose used to be a popular name, at the beginning of the twentieth century and then it faded to a level of about 200 in a million (these are US figures by the way). So, how do I know this? Go to Baby Name Wizard and you can get a graph of the...
Robin Bloor | 29th January '07
Lotus gets aggressive, and a Second Life
So I'm here at Lotusphere, the first conference of the year. I confess to being impressed by what I've seen so far. Lotus puts on a good show—the best—great special effects and entertainment. The overture to the keynote session was a...
Robin Bloor | 24th January '07