Eric Lundquist

Now that Steve Ballmer has announced his retirement (and added $800 million to his bank account by doing so), the analysts have rushed to fill the vacuum created by sizing up potential candidates and offering opinions on how the company should rearrange itself. The U.K.-based Guardian has gone to the point of offering a list […]

Chief marketing officers have picked up a hefty chunk of the enterprise technology budget, and now they have to take a leadership role in technology selection and acquisition. The old methods of tech marketing: build awareness, capture leads, nurture those leads and eventually toss the leads over the marketing wall to the sales force, have […]

After a marathon PowerPoint product introduction day at Microsoft, a group of tech journalists, myself included, was invited to join Steve Ballmer at a Mariners baseball game over at Safeco Field. I don’t remember the exact date, but it must have been after 1999 as that is when the team moved to Safeco. What I […]

Microsoft really started on its course toward great fortune and power when Windows 1.01 arrived in 1985. Since then, Microsoft and Windows have been indivisibly intertwined. There were indeed earlier prototype versions of Windows, and there were lots of other graphical user interfaces, including those from Apple, Atari, Quarterdeck and IBM. But Windows propelled Microsoft […]

When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the chief information officer position were many and morbid. A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. […]

“Klaatu barada nikto” was an early form of voice-based authentication and one that for techies and science fiction movie fans quickly moved into pop culture. The phrase was used in the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and if that command had failed, then the giant robot Gort would have wreaked havoc on […]

The Black Hat hacker conference saw nearly 8,000 digital security pros talking, hacking and holding press briefings on the latest security holes in the corporate armor. Smartphones were hacked and demonstrated to act as secret recorders relaying your conference room discussions to outside listeners. Sensors running in manufacturing plants and on oil pipelines were remotely […]

It was a rare speech for the director of a super secret agency and was admirable for presenting what public facts are available and gamely handling hecklers. A bigger obstacle than hecklers or the acts was the speech’s timing. It took place the same day NSA secrets leaker Edward Snowden published new documents via the […]

This year’s annual Black Hat security conference is about to get underway this week. The conference always promises a security professional’s mix of research, vulnerability disclosures and general updates on the state of digital security. This year’s keynote speakers include Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and […]

Google launched on July 24 a bunch of new products and services (the $35 Chromecast TV viewer was the coolest) aimed at the consumer space, where the combination of Android phones and tablets, Google services and the Chrome system are enjoying growth. While I was watching the press conference—via YouTube, which was done really well […]

You are embarrassed to discover your company is sending mail to a former customer now deceased. You have to hire a swivel-chair data input operator who spends the day re-entering data between incompatible systems by swiveling from screen to screen. Government organizations are supposed to share data on suspicious individuals, but a name falls through […]

Here’s the issue that the IT industry is already starting to deal with: Big data creates lots of new, well-paying jobs but in a digital update of the prime maxim of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, demand will outstrip supply, some experts contend. And it will get worse, because those newly graduated data […]