Business Center Blogs

TRACY, CA -- Black Friday customers who arrived at the Walmart store here, expecting to purchase an e-Machines laptop for the $198 Black Friday price were surprised to find the entire shipment of 37 units had been assigned to other customers the day before.

A store manager admitted that the only way for a customer to know that tickets allowing later purchase of the machines were being distributed early would have been to call the store and ask.

Holiday electronics sales can be as good for scoring new business gear as for loading up the kids' stockings. But smart buyers should be wary of doorbuster tactics.

It's generally regarded as fact that Black Friday is the hottest shopping day of the year, with deal seekers lining up as early as 3:00 AM outside tech superstores nationwide. But pre-dawn sales aren't all they're cracked up to be. In reality, doorbuster deals are laden with fine-print gotchas that can turn holiday zeal into buyer's remorse. Whether you're shopping for business or pleasure, here's why you'd do well to sleep in on Friday morning.

This Friday is Black Friday--officially kicking off the 2009 holiday shopping season. Online attackers and malware developers know how to capitalize on current events, and the rush to find great holiday bargains offers a prime opportunity to exploit eager shoppers. Here are five tips to help you shop online securely.

1. Start with the Basics. I realize that it seems redundant and cliché, but the first step in protecting yourself and your computer this holiday season is to make sure your computer is patched and secure .

Is four years and a $250,000 fine really the best punishment for the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Spam?" Put another way: Do we take the criminal aspects of spam seriously enough?

I don't think so. But, we're also not ready to hunt down spammers or create effective measures to stop spam at the source.

Apple has established the concept of the app store and continues to define the business model for competitors to follow. Mobile operating system platforms, at least those intended for smartphones, are more or less required to have some form of app store now, but enough is enough with 'there's an app for that'. How many apps do we need, exactly?

App Store boasts over 100,000 apps. Contrast that with the roughly 10,000 apps in the Android Market, or the approximately 1,000 apps available from Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and you can easily see that Apple is by far the leader in the app store arena.

Amazon has led the way in driving acceptance of ebook reader devices with its Kindle, but now the market has gotten crowded. This is just the beginning though as ebook readers start to transition from purely consumer gadgets to accepted business tools.

Apparently Barnes and Noble and Sony failed to read the Forrester Research report when planning production of their ebook readers. Forrester predicted that as many as 1 million electronic book reading gadgets will be sold this holiday season, but the Barnes and Noble Nook and the Sony Reader couldn't keep up with demand and will miss out on the party.

Verizon has challenged Sprint's marketing claim that its "America's most dependable 3G network." The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus has asked Sprint to drop the slogan in response to the Verizon complaint, expanding the ongoing marketing battle between the leading mobile service providers.

Verizon is already engaged in a heated battle with AT&T revolving around its 'There's a Map for That' ad campaign. Verizon's very clever marketing compares maps of the United States showing that Verizon has five times the 3G network coverage of rival provider AT&T.

Google is the leader in online search and search-based advertising, and recent acquisitions are designed to expand the vast Google empire. Critics take exception to Google undercutting traditional marketing channels, but the evolving advertising landscape levels the playing field for small and medium businesses.

Google recently purchased AdMob, which targets advertising on mobile devices, and now has also acquired Teracent, a firm focused on online display advertising. Google's voracious appetite for new advertising revenue streams borders on monopolistic.

The recently released Microsoft Security Intelligence Report highlights the vast improvements in security from Windows XP to Windows 7. Even so, no operating system is perfect. I asked security experts what they think about Windows 7 security and came up with a list of what Microsoft got right and where Microsoft is still missing the mark.

A Step in the Right Direction

Microsoft made significant changes to how it protects the Windows operating system kernel and added a number of new security controls when it transitioned from Windows XP to Windows Vista. With Windows 7, many of those security controls are enhanced and there are some new features as well.

If the world needs one browser-based operating system, why not three more? With the interest Google's Chrome OS has generated, can operating systems based upon Firefox, Internet Explorer, even Opera, be far behind?

Chrome OS is potentially a major threat to Microsoft. It may also be a sideshow or even a bust, but that isn't a chance Redmond should take. If I were Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, or Stephen Sinofsky, I'd have launched the Internet Explorer OS project months ago.