Eric Lundquist

Quick, give me a list of successful high technology executives who went on to become super-successful in other fields. Stumped? I dont blame you—the list is very small. Thats among the reasons why Sheldon Adelsons story is so remarkable. Sheldon was in the news recently as the man behind the opening of the $2.4 billion […]

In this era of financial systems that track billions of shares traded, why is it that nearly every story on the sub-prime mortgage crisis starts with a statement about no one knowing the extent of the crisis? I did a column about the need for more friction in this high tech frictionless economy which spurred […]

You should know three things about Stan Shih. He figured out the PC industry faster and better than any other major executive; he came up with one of the easiest-to-understand descriptions of where to make money in computers; and he knew when to get out. Shih was co-founder of what became Acer Group in 1976. […]

Quick, give me a list of list of successful high technology executives who went on to become super successful in other fields. Stumped? I don’t blame you, the list is very small as near as I can figure. That’s among the reasons why Sheldon Adelson’s story is so remarkable. Sheldon was in the news recently […]

Acer acquiring Gateway means that Dell has to look over both shoulders at the same time. On one hand, Dell’s past mistakes have allowed a focused Hewlett-Packard to regain market share, become the best friend a channel vendor can have and provide a very competitive set of business computers from laptops (running whichever OS you’d […]

The New York Times (and eWeek) had a story on Saturday about a Chinese technology company interested in buying Seagate Technology. The unidentified company set off a round of fears that Chinese purchasing a hard drive company might endanger U.S. security interests by giving it undue access to both encryption technologies and manufacturing technologies. I […]

Forget about the frictionless high-tech economy—how about a little more friction instead? In between flights recently, I caught tidbits from CNN at the airport on the continuing subprime-mortgage meltdown. In the stories about hapless homeowners facing ever-rising mortgages, there was an undercurrent of the unknown. The biggest unknown: Exactly how serious is the mortgage crisis […]

When all else fails, blame it on the algorithm. Skype had a major service outage recently. But aren’t systems that run on peer to peer architectures supposed to be able to avoid a big crash as networks of peers provide many alternative avenues for data to travel and many individual peers to take up the […]

Cynthia Rettig has an article worth reading this month in the MIT Sloan Management Review. The article entiitled, “The Trouble with enterprise software,” doesn’t break a lot of new ground but does provide some research justification to the naysayers. The use of multiple databases, lots of legacy applications and the complexity of making it all […]

The yin and yang of chip design this week. At the hot chips conference in Stanford, Tilera talked about their 64 processor architecture. The company which has about $40 million in funding behind it is talking about hitting 1,000 processors by 2014. Of course it is not the number of processors on the chip as […]

So, going green in the server room and in the rest of your company is a good idea, right? I dont think there would be too many “nay” votes on that topic. But, too often, initiatives like going green become a big, bureaucratic tangle. The great corporate alternative to actually making decisions and doing something […]

The fake Steve Jobs got his fake training from a fake cat (er, Katt) Yes, I chuckled along with the rest of the East Coasters when it was revealed that the fake Steve Jobs was NOT a West Coaster, not a young hip blogger (sorry, Dan) and not uncovered by the blogging crowd that will […]