Browsing: Duncan McLeod

Vodacom’s new CEO, Shameel Joosub, last week fired a shot over rival Cell C’s bows, warning that SA’s biggest operator will not give way to Cell C, now led by his former boss Alan Knott-Craig. Consumers have ringside seats to what is going to be an epic battle between two great tacticians

These are anxious times for the world’s largest software company. Microsoft has watched as long-time nemesis Apple has reinvented the smartphone and tablet businesses, carving out most of the industry’s profits for itself. Today, Apple is worth

It’s all come down to this. Fifteen years after Telkom was partially privatised and nine years after it was listed on the JSE, communications minister Dina Pule was scheduled to present three options for the future of the company to President Jacob Zuma and members of his cabinet on Wednesday

Terrestrial television offers remarkably little choice to SA consumers, who are limited to three SABC channels and commercial free-to-air channel e.tv. Not much has changed in the past decade, except that e.tv has eaten into the SABC’s viewership while DStv, owned by Naspers’s MultiChoice, has grown steadily more dominant as

The days of watching YouTube videos buffer, even high-definition ones, may soon be over — for some consumers, anyway. Telkom this week launched the commercial trial of its new 20Mbit/s and 40Mbit/s digital subscriber line services. These speeds are far greater than anything offered by the fixed-line operator to date and

To understand the importance — and irony — of last week’s court victory by Apple, it’s necessary to go back to 1979. It was 33 years ago that a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to the Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), a research and development facility in Silicon Valley owned by Xerox. Xerox Parc is renowned for having

It’s not often I find myself cheering when reading through government documents, but I did just that last week as I took in the plan’s revised proposals for the information and communications technology sector. Here, in black and white, a government commission has laid out many

With hype building once again ahead of the launch of the next iPhone, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the world doesn’t revolve around the fruity company in California. The new iPhone — or whatever it’s eventually called — is guaranteed saturation coverage in the next few weeks leading up to a rumoured 12 September

Public enterprises director-general Tshediso Matona said last week that government has made no decision about what it plans to do about the vexing question of Telkom. Ruling-party politicians are debating whether the company will remain listed on the JSE or

It’s hard to think that just 15 years ago, Apple was staring bankruptcy in the face. What followed, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, has become one of the most celebrated turnaround stories in modern business. At more than US$550bn, Apple today is the biggest listed company on the planet by market value