Sunderland is building a reputation for software development, and Glasgow is working towards becoming one of the UK's first smart cities.
Companies like Symantec, the giant Internet security firm, are introducing services that assess the "reputation" of software, weighing factors like how old it is and how widely it is used to decide if it is safe.
The typical Signal Media buyer is currently the head of PR or head of comms in a professional services, financial or legal firm — who's after reputation management software.
This became a major product, and established Buxton's reputation as a software wunderkind.
Oracle, these books tell us, acquired a reputation for selling software not yet ready for use, and for blaming customers when things went wrong.
Yet in the business of outsourced technology services, where suppliers build and maintain a customer's vital software, reputation matters a lot.
He achieved hero status within Microsoft several years ago by taking over the leadership of Windows after the debacle that was Windows Vista, a much-delayed operating system whose sluggish performance and technical problems worsened Microsoft's reputation for mediocre software.
At stake is close to a billion dollars along with the beleaguered reputation of the software giant and its chairman.
Now we have started on a great fragmentation of computing, mobile machines that need very different chips than the ones Intel made its reputation with, running software that is not necessarily Microsoft's.
A. Microsoft's reputation for doing great software research is very strong, and people are looking to us now and saying, "no other software company has solved this; you, Microsoft, need to solve it".
