Joseph Gacinga

Although Amazon.com's Fire Kindle tablet has generally under-performed in the market, that does not necessarily mean that the company's new smartphone will follow the same path.

Highly competitive pricing by Google Drive and Dropbox has pushed Canonical's cloud service, Ubuntu One, out of business. Ironically, the company is advising Ubuntu One users to move their data to Google Drive before it finally closes its doors in July 2014.

Microsoft has promised to make big price cuts for its Windows devices (smartphones and tablets) later this year. This move looks aimed at getting more people to connect to its cloud, since Microsoft is already losing money on tablet sales.

AMD is likely to see good growth in its revenue once it launches 64-bit ARM chips for use in servers and data centers. But, low-power servers are more likely to serve a niche market, not as a substitute for traditional servers. Therefore, growth in ARM's server chips probably won't have a big impact on Intel's x86 server chips.

Applied Micro Devices and Canonical are likely to deploy 64-bit ARM chips in servers and data centers ahead of AMD. The potential of ARM chips to compete effectively against Intel's x86 server chips is good, but it will be an uphill journey before the new chips can cause a big dent.

Apple's cloud has mostly remained hidden in the background since its inception three years ago. But, the new iCloud Drive has improved inter-operability with other clouds, which should drive new business for the company.

The claims that Google has been banning high-earning publishers from its AdSense program are untrue. The search giant has been cleaning up its display network to get rid of publishers who game the system and end up scamming advertisers out of their money.

IBM has been experiencing declining revenue for two years now. The shares are very cheap as a result of this. However, IBM is also in several high-growth and high-margin businesses and this makes it a good long-term investment.

A recent Gartner report shows that Microsoft is catching up in cloud IaaS, which is dominated by Amazon Web Services. At current growth rates, growth in Microsoft's cloud could outstrip the company's overall revenue growth in just a few years' time.

According to Gartner, Workday and NetSuite are among the fastest-growing ERP vendors. More companies are preferring to work with SaaS companies instead of traditional software companies, as they are typically more innovative and often provide a faster product turnaround time.

Workdays shares look expensive, even after their huge sell-of this year. The company's latest quarterly report also shows that it failed to turn a profit, again. Considering this, is the company a good long-term investment?

Costco's decision to take only small steps as it tries to lure the younger crowd to its stores is a sound one. Drastic changes in retail often turn out to be too jarring for customers, and they can easily damage a company's business.

Micron shares are not too expensive, despite having made big gains in the last 12 months. The company's strong revenue and earnings growth offer good support for the shares. The company also has a good future growth profile, and the shares can run even further.

Microsoft might launch a new Nokia X version soon. This appears to be a 180-degree about-face from the company's old ''Windows First'' policy. Microsoft's new line of thinking seems to be that it doesn't really matter if new customers connect to its cloud via Windows Phones or Nokia smartphones, as long as its cloud is the beneficiary in the end.

Symantec's traditional antivirus software seems to have stagnated, in terms of growth. The company is, however, quickly introducing new, non-traditional revenue sources to its portfolio such as advanced cyber-security software and mobile-device security solutions, which should drive new growth in the company.

Microsoft should increase the cadence of new Windows releases and updates. This way, the company can mitigate against versions that perform less well, and prevent its users from shifting to enemy camps.

Both Cisco's and VMware's SDN strategies have both strong merits and shortcomings, but which is better?

Investors fear that AT&T and Comcast will bring cheaper home security solutions by bundling the service with existing offers, thus increasing margin pressure for market leader ADT. But, this has not been the case.

VMware's software-centric SDN strategy is not inferior to Cisco's hardware-centric strategy since both have clear-cut uses. EMC is,however, lagging behind in converged systems and, will have to partner with a networking and hardware company in the future.

Amazon's spiraling operating costs are likely to grow as long as the company continues to rapidly increase its revenue. What's this mean for Amazon and its investors?