John Taschek

Oracle launched a vicious attack on Microsofts Exchange at the recent OpenWorld conference. But Exchange is both too easy and too slippery a target: No matter how many viruses, security alerts, maintenance issues or general complaints come in, Exchange is still the most popular enterprise and workgroup e-mail system ever. To me, that says customers […]

Doodling on paper is about to become a thing of the past. Alias/Wavefronts forthcoming SketchBook Pro takes high-quality art and artists into a new low-cost digital age. SketchBook, which is in beta tests now, could change art on the desktop as much as Ventura Publisher changed publishing nearly 20 years ago. Although Alias/Wavefront is not […]

Dells entry into the PDA space with sub-$200 and sub-$300 devices scared the heck out of competitors. Then they actually saw the devices and went back to their normal lives. Ho-hum was the collective reaction. One has to wonder what Dell is doing in the space. The company is clearly trying to undercut rivals on […]

Dell has become the darling of the industry, taking commodity products, spitting them out on an efficient computer manufacturing machine and backing them up with adequate support. But Dell is lately spreading itself thin and jumping into areas it doesnt really know about. Its turned from a manufacturing machine to a marketing machine. Dell is […]

The idea of the Tablet PC has been received with everything from mild enthusiasm to wild derision. The reality, of course, is somewhere in between—with more to like than would appear at first glance. eWeek Labs recently put six Tablet PC systems to the enterprise test and found that at least some Tablet PCs are […]

A strange thing is happening in the industry, and it cant be good. Billion-dollar vendors are apologizing for doing what theyre supposed to do. Rather than blame a massive downturn in technology spending on the post-Internet bubble, the year 2000 buildup of tech expenditures, corporate ethical collapses, terrorist attacks or simply plain-old business cycles, many […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Larry Ellison, part-time Oracle Corp. captain and full-time sailor, closed out the OracleWorld show here on Thursday by pointing out all the problems with the high-tech industry. Ever the salesman, as well as sailor, the Oracle chairman and CEO also said that Oracle has all the answers to a flagging economy as […]

Stan Shih, chairman of Acer Inc., has been hailed as a visionary in the computer industry for bringing marketing and branding strategies to what has been traditionally a control-oriented manufacturing culture in Taiwan. Acer and its subsidiaries which once manufactured the computers, monitors, and motherboards, for many of the top US brands, is now one […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Dell Computer Chairman Michael Dell pounded on Unix vendors and espoused the virtues of Linux in a keynote address at the OracleWorld conference here on Tuesday. “In Linux, we have found a better Unix. Linux is the new Unix,” Dell said. While minimizing the mentions of competitors name, Dell focused primarily on […]

Vendors trying to compete with Microsoft on performance benchmarking should give up and throw in the towel. Theres no hope for success. Microsoft will win every possible benchmark war in every major category. For those of us who count “The Terminator” as an influential movie, let this put it into perspective: “[Microsoft] cant be bargained […]