The big picture: Many companies, including those in the tech sector, often use noncompete agreements to prevent employee poaching. However, the US Federal Trade Commission now deems this practice unfair, asserting that companies have alternative methods to safeguard their intellectual property. The commission anticipates that banning nearly all noncompete agreements will enhance working conditions and foster innovation.
The big picture: Starting tomorrow, Nvidia is hosting its GTC developer conference. Once a sideshow for semis, the event has transformed into the center of attention for much of the industry. With Nvidia's rise, many have been asking the extent to which Nvidia's software provides a durable competitive moat for its hardware. As we have been getting a lot of questions about that, we want to lay out our thoughts here.
There's a way out from the intrusive cloud service
In a nutshell: Microsoft has been pushing OneDrive as the standard cloud storage solution for Windows for quite some time, to the point of user annoyance. The company usually tries everything it can to hinder user's choice on how to deal with the service, but things are seemingly starting to change.
Qualcomm does indeed have 50,000-ish employees, double those of Nvidia and AMD
Why it matters: After looking at revenue and operating income per employee for big semiconductor companies, we thought that was a fun exercise, so we have looked at another dozen tech companies in various sectors. Broadcom and Apple are in a league of their own – it is good to have a software or licensing business.