David Coursey

The great thing about Microsoft is how the week after it gives you a half-billion dollars to settle complaints of anti-competitive practices it then comes for you with the long knives. /zimages/5/28571.gifClick here to read “Microsoft Moves Closer to Wiping Its Antitrust Slate Clean.” Its not that Microsoft is going to steal the money back […]

Each recent release of Microsoft Office seems to have had a theme. Office XP was about presenting users with features they didnt know existed and providing an overall higher level of help and out-of-the-box support. It was the release of the Task Pane. Much of that seemed to disappear or be muted in Office 2003, […]

Which company is the biggest spender in the Linux world? Is it IBM? Sun Microsystems? Red Hat? Novell? No, the biggest spender in Linux, at least this year, is arguably the company most threatened by its success. With this weeks $536 million settlement of a legal battle with Novell and Aprils $1.9 billion deal with […]

The efforts of the “Source Code Club” to sell the source code to Cisco firewalls may be despicable, but they may also be a blessing in disguise. By making a public show of Ciscos inability to keep its secrets to itself, these desperados may actually be doing us all a big favor. This is not […]

Is computing not making the progress it used to, or did I just read a story about Microsofts Internet Explorer losing a tiny bit of its overwhelming market share? I thought wed gotten this browser thing down several years ago and had moved on. Apparently, I was mistaken. So here I am doing something I […]

Just because you have technology to throw at a process or problem doesnt mean it will actually help. There are many places where pushing the technological envelope has no place at all. And next week, a record number of Americans are expected to visit one of them: Its their local polling place. Here in California […]

Do people really want to see streaming video pop-ups from their instant messaging clients? Or more to the point as this election season winds down, do users want to see a political ad from a group or candidate they do not support, or worse, may actually despise? Thats the question the ad sales think-tank at […]

When was the last time Microsoft released an upgrade that got you really excited? An upgrade you wanted because it did something new that you actually needed done? Im not talking about a security fix or a patch necessary to make something work properly (which would seem to include Windows XP SP2), but something that […]

What is Microsofts biggest failure? Some say its the security crisis that has surrounded the company for the past few years, while others cite Microsofts slow adoption of Internet technology. Some believe its the gelding of Longhorn into Shorthorn; a few still remember good ol Microsoft Bob. While all of these made news and some […]

The criticism of human RFID tagging that Ive been seeing sometimes misses the point, with potentially deadly results. This is not simply a human version of the chips Ive had injected into the scruffs of both of my cats necks. I did this after a third cat lost its collar and ran away, never to […]

Tell me that Microsoft is building server versions of what until now have been desktop applications, and the first thing that comes to my mind is Web services. That may not be what Microsoft is planning to ship with Office 12, but the rumors were hearing are nevertheless exciting. Its also possible, even if people […]

After three-and-a-half years, Microsofts Software Assurance program hasnt brought customers the 200 percent to 300 percent increases in software cost that many predicted when it was announced in May 2001. My friend Laura DiDio, a well-known Yankee Group analyst, recently completed a survey that found that most customers on Software Assurance have seen the cost […]