John Taschek

Microsoft Corp.s Microsoft CRM raises the bar for customer relationship management in the small and midsize markets. Unfortunately, it was a low bar to begin with. It might not matter, though. To the IT community, Microsoft CRM is perhaps the most important business solution released to date. Microsoft has blurred the lines between technologist and […]

With consolidation in the application server space and incredible pressure from IBM, not to mention the lousy economic climate, BEA Systems Inc. finds itself battling not only vendors 100 times its size but also public perception and an analyst community that tends to write it off. But BEA has survived all this—and has even grown—through […]

SAN DIEGO—As the city prepped for the Super Bowl, workers were rushing to build temporary platforms and property demarcations presumably for impromptu celebrations. Those in IT who have seen one “platform” after another come and go might make a quick analogy. At least one company here certainly hoped this wasnt the case. Oracle, at its […]

Intel is finally getting its mobile computing strategy right. after years of pushing processor performance as a feature thats more important than battery life, Intels Centrino delivers better performance without sacrificing battery life. The secret sauce comes from a series of components that Intel has branded Centrino, which may sound like a late-1960s-model Oldsmobile. Centrino, […]

This is it: my last column for eWEEK. After nearly 300 product reviews, 400 columns and thousands of meetings over the last 11 years, its time for me to call it quits. Im taking a position at a CRM vendor located in San Francisco. Its a big change, but its really no bigger than the […]

Frontbridge Technologies Inc.s TrueProtect Message Management Suite and SpamShark service stand out as solid anti-spamware, and after two months of real-world testing, the duo earns eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice honors for the enterprise market. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY FrontBridge TrueProtect Suite Although no junk-mail filtering service is 100 percent effective—the best services stop only about 90 percent […]

Product activation is one of the thorniest issues in software today. While license protection schemes have existed for decades, it wasnt until Microsoft embedded its infamous product activation scheme into Windows XP that customers felt these schemes had become heavy-handed. Now Adobe is experimenting with implementing activation but is tweaking it so the consumer experience […]

Back in May, the Harvard Business Review published “IT Doesnt Matter,” an article by Nicholas Carr. The headline has goaded many people to choose sides and was so provocative that the HBR ran a second piece with letters to the editor from industry luminaries. But things are not as clear-cut as they seem. Certainly, IT […]

If theres ever been a personal computer that everyones gotta get, its the Apple Power Mac G5. Even x86 fanatics have to admit that the G5 has everything they could possibly want in a personal computer. The G5 is a screamer, with a 1GHz front-side bus and an IBM 64-bit Power4 processor, and its as […]

ViewSonic May Be Known as a Monitor Company, but it can turn out a good PDA, too. The Pocket PC V37, which will list for about $399, is small, light and fast, and it has Microsofts .Net Compact Framework inside to boot (so to speak). The V37s Intel 400MHz XScale processor provides snappy performance, and […]

Its a soap opera, and as such, its a tragedy. Im talking, of course, about Oracles hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, which came on the heels of PeopleSofts bid for J.D. Edwards. Where else this side of afternoon TV can you get CEOs screaming at each other through press releases? PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway calls […]

Stanford University is using supercomputer clusters as a way to bridge the once-isolated disciplines of physics, biology and engineering. Vijay Pande, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford who spearheaded the project, said 20 to 40 research groups across several disciplines will be using the cluster. The groups will be housed in the new Bio-X […]