Eric Lundquist

Talk about pressure. I was speaking early last week with an IT manager who was describing how he had been faring under the current reality of tight budgets and staff cutbacks. What were his feelings about outsourcing? Not favorable. The latest round of pressure from upper management was to give this IT manager a fixed […]

Lets see. For every one icon AOL gets to place on the XP startup screen, Microsoft gets to place three icons, according to our recent news story. But PC makers are facing tough times, and those bucks they get from Internet service providers for sticking those icons on startup screens have suddenly become their most […]

How many times can you have the conversation regarding hope for an uptick in the technology business? If my trip to the West Coast last week is any gauge, the answer is many more times than you care to. In cabs, restaurants and airport lounges, techies were trying to read the digital tea leaves, hoping […]

Last week, Intel president Craig Barrett, speaking in Malaysia, said the PC industry has bottomed out. This was seen as good news by Wall Street, which has been looking this summer for reasons to believe in a market recovery. The market may have bottomed out, but Id say it has to make serious amends before […]

Heres a suggestion. In an economic period when layoffs mount with ever-increasing frequency and forecasts of recovery stretch out every day, you probably dont want to anger your current customers. But, in my opinion, anger and resentment are exactly what are being created by the Business Software Alliances anti-piracy campaign. As this weeks report starting […]

Connect, transact, analyze and correct. following a cross-country jaunt that took me from Boston to Raleigh to San Jose last week while digging into the status of Web services, I found those four terms seem to do a decent job at getting to the basics of what this services business will become. I say “will […]

Remember Todd Rundgren? Besides giving everyone weary of the daily work grind that great anti-work anthem, “Bang on the Drum All Day,” Rundgren was also early on the Web, in the forefront of multimedia concerts and quick on using technology to further his artistic efforts. After a week of talking to company execs trying to […]

Whether striding up to the microphone or sliding in by the side door, computer makers are busy recasting themselves as service organizations. The reasoning behind this collective salute to service is not hard to understand. You can still make money selling service, but it gets harder and harder to make money selling boxes. When did […]

As if we didnt have enough worries with cell phones, what with all our concerns over our brains being fried while yakking, driving into bridge abutments while copying the grocery list and being found to be where we shouldnt by internal GPS locators, now weve got one more worry. All those billions weve spent on […]

By all evidence, we are not yet dealing with maturing technologies that, after having sparkled for a half-decade, are now in the process of fizzling out.” Larry Ellison? Marc Andreessen? Bill himself? No. That quote is from Fed chief Alan Greenspan speaking before economists in New York last month. Greenspan was talking about the use […]

As weve said for several years now, security is the first and last step in building an e-business enterprise. It is also the part of the infrastructure task that garners the least applause for a job well done. No one will thank you for keeping all those bad guys out of the companys network. Someone […]

Office XP looks like a winner for having the wisdom to kill Clippy and replace that helpless helper with smart tags and task panes that are actually useful. But will neat new productivity and group features be sufficient to get Office XP a home on corporate desktops? Given that the removal of an annoying character […]