Stories about: Mindshare

In many ways, Apple is already a giant. Its US$118 billion market cap, which briefly surpassed Google's this year, is larger than that of Hewlett-Packard Co. Its sales, which are nearly $31 billion a year, have grown almost 40 percent annually the past five years. And, then there's its mindshare with the general public.

With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race in which it is a very late entrant.

Originally positioned as a Web-based service for synchronizing files and data folders across different devices, Microsoft's Live Mesh is poised to emerge as a cloud-based development environment at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

Sometime this week, developers will be able to get their hands on a preview SDK (software development kit) for JavaFX, Sun's entry into the RIA (rich Internet application) framework wars, according to an official company blog post.

"We have come into real contention [for mindshare] in the enterprise," said Tim O'Reilly, CEO at O'Reilly Media, in his keynote address at OSCON, last week's Open Source convention in the US. "So we should be patting ourselves on the back, right? I'm not so sure."

Apple is moving up the charts, toppling Acer to become the third largest PC vendor in the U.S., according to a survey from Gartner.

Green IT is a growing global phenomenon, with customers now seeking out IT vendors whose offerings are more energy-efficient, more material-efficient, less hazardous, designed for greater recyclability, and supported by end-of-life recycling programs, according to IDC's green IT research team.

If the buzz among attendees of last week's Google I/O conference in San Francisco revealed a common thread, it was that the search giant's ongoing push for developer mindshare remains intriguing, though rife with questions and concerns.

Adobe this week is set to unveil the next version of its Adobe Acrobat software, which adds support for the company's Flash multimedia technology. The company also plans to launch a new Web site offering users free hosted services for document creation, sharing and storage.

Advanced Micro Devices is looking to forge ahead into the enterprise market by creating a commercial road map and realigning desktop platforms into an enterprise offering.

What will be the next big opportunity in the ICT industry? Where are the mega-vendors going? How do you tell one vendor from another?