Trailblazers

Steve Ballmer on Tuesday severed the last of his official ties with Microsoft -- he resigned from the board of directors. Ballmer gave up his CEO role in February. Ballmer's other duties have become too pressing for him to focus on Microsoft, he wrote in a letter addressed to CEO Satya Nadella. "I t...

BlackBerry -- the "sick man of mobile" -- is poised for better times. That was the sentiment expressed by CEO John Chen in an internal memo distributed to BlackBerry employees last week. BlackBerry has completed its restructuring and the workforce reductions that started three years ago have been co...

Amazon may wow customers with its extraordinary array of products and customer services, but its shareholders are less-than-impressed at the moment. The company on Thursday announced second-quarter losses that were nearly double what analysts had been expecting. Furthermore, Amazon informed sharehol...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday mapped out his vision for the company's future, emphasizing cloud and mobile computing, in a letter to all employees. "More recently, we have described ourselves as a 'devices and services' company. While the devices and services description was helpful in sta...

People need to work less than 1 percent of the time they do to fulfill their basic needs -- housing, security and opportunities for their children -- Google cofounder Larry Page suggested recently, reviving a Utopian vision that has long been a staple of sci-fi as well as technologists' vision of th...

T-Mobile CEO John Legere was his usual controversial self when he took the stage at the company's Un-Carrier 5.0 event on Wednesday, striding on after being announced like a wrestling champ and lacing the air with profanities. AT&T and Verizon were "greedy bastards" that were "raping" customers,...

Apple grew from a small Microsoft competitor in the 1990s, to the tech giant of the 2000s. However, since Steve Jobs' passing a few short years ago, Apple has changed. At the same time, the industry has changed. Today, Google and Samsung offer strong competition. Apple now has to do something it nev...

Vic Gundotra, who moved Google into the social media world, first with the ill-fated Buzz and then with Google+, on Thursday announced his departure from the company. "Now is the time for a new journey," he wrote, fittingly, on Google+. The announcement was laced with the usual praise for colleagues...

Want to watch a new tech race? Keep your eyes on the new 1 Gbps ultra high-speed Internet race. Over the next few years, this will continue to grow and become one of the hottest races around. So who will the leaders be? Today, entrants like Google, AT&T, C Spire and CenturyLink already have star...

The uproar that erupted over Mozilla Foundation cofounder Brendan Eich's appointment as CEO of its subsidiary Mozilla Corp. and resulted in his stepping down earlier this month perhaps was symptomatic of the troubles the foundation is going through, in that opposition to his taking the post had both...

We are now living during a wave of social change, and we will not know how the Internet has affected society until we look back on it in the future. A great example of this: When Alexander Graham Bell obtained his patent for the telephone in 1875, no one could have foreseen that a lawyer from Texas ...

In a move that has added fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace. One of the company's three cofounders and his wife had persistently intimidated her, an...

What is going on with Sprint Softbank? What will the company look like when it finally emerges from its cocoon? Who else will it merge with? Where will it be based? There has been quite a bit of transformational work going on. Sprint and Softbank won U.S. government approval after months of vigorous...

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer will retire in September, when he'll be replaced by Corporate Controller Luca Maestri, the company's VP of finance. Maestri will begin taking the reins in June. The move was expected. When Maestri joined Apple last year, the rumor mill began buzzing about his being groome...

CEO Satya Nadella has begun his much-anticipated shakeup of Microsoft's leadership ranks, just weeks after taking the helm. Tony Bates, EVP of business development and evangelism, and Tami Reller, EVP of marketing, are on the way out. Eric Rudder, EVP of advanced strategy, will take over Bates' duti...