John Taschek

Since the advent of e-commerce, standards bodies have been seeking a lingua franca for business communication. Unfortunately, early efforts such as EDI had a high barrier to entry in terms of cost and complexity. However, a new specification—Universal Business Language—may deliver on the common-language promise. More recently, XML and the public Internet were thought to […]

Its been a tough year for Microsoft, and its only February. First, the company was attacked simply for taking .Net out of its server naming strategy. That led The New York Times to question whether Microsofts strategy was effective. Then the SQL Slammer worm, which affected Microsoft SQL Server implementations across the planet, nearly crippled […]

Its clear that decision support systems and analytics engines make a good fit for applied science disciplines. Its also clear that bioinformatics is one of the areas that can benefit the most. Spotfire Inc.s DecisionSite is a good fit for those areas (see eWEEK Labs review of Spotfire DecisionSite Posters 7.1.1). Accelrys Inc., the software […]

Sales of 802.11g-based hardware are on fire, but organizations could get burned by buying into “g” now. The WRT54G wireless router from Linksys Group Inc. was released in late December and is already a bona fide success—enticing consumers and scaring competitors with a low, $130 retail price and promises of 54M-bps wireless performance. Organizations, however, […]

Its next to impossible to disprove or prove anything IBM says. The company keeps its numbers way too private to make any sense to ordinary people or most financial analysts. It just feels contrived that IBM is claiming revenue of $1 billion on Linux. After all, just a little more than a year ago, IBM […]

Dateline: San Diego, Jan. 22. as the city prepped for the Super Bowl, workers rushed 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. But Oracle, at its AppsWorld conference here, hoped that its platform […]

Documents dont have the panache they used to. Most people dont know the difference between a document and a Web page, and, even if they do, they dont see why documents are necessary in the first place. (Hint: Documents are self-contained, encapsulated information, and, sometimes, its legally required or simply practical to have electronic forms […]

SAN DIEGO—Larry Ellison, looking weathered but unshaken by Oracle Corp.s recent crushing loss to Alinghi in the Louis Vuitton Cup, blew some wind in the sails of the application service provider market at the Oracle Appsworld show here Tuesday. Ellison, commenting on Oracles renewed interest in outsourcing, said the time is right for hosted applications, […]

Let me be the first to say it: 802.11a stinks for all practical purposes. The wireless networking standard for 54M-bps bandwidth in the 5GHz range started slowly, gained momentum slowly and is now on its way out. At least, thats what Steve Jobs said in his Macworld keynote earlier this month. Thats why Jobs is […]

The CES show just ended in Las Vegas. Energized by new personal entertainment products, the show can be one massive headache to those trying to avoid succumbing to gadget culture. I neglected to go this year. However, it was the second-most-talked-about computer industry conference of the past 12 months. (The most-talked-about show was Comdex, and […]

Its been years since Ive written a predictions column, and looking back at my efforts, I can see why I stopped. Unfortunately, this is my one chance this year to look into my clouded crystal ball. So, here are my predictions, more or less ordered by their chance of success. 1) Microsoft CRM finally ships. […]

After receiving nearly a hundred angry letters in response to my “Dells misfires on PDA strategy” column (Dec. 9), Ive realized that perhaps I made three tactical errors. The errors have nothing to do with the facts, which were laid out in the column. My first problem was that I timed the column during the […]