Peter Coffee

A respected PC industry innovator has made his opinion clear: “The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” That judgment was delivered in 1996 by a fellow named Steve Jobs—whos still involved in the business, I believe, at a company that some would call one of Microsofts most significant competitors. Does […]

When Bill Gates first became interested in computers, being a user of a small computer meant being a hobbyist programmer-not a gamer, not a video producer, not a social networker. It’s therefore no surprise that Gates drove Microsoft’s focus toward developer tools and application foundations in a way that tracked the evolving nature of the […]

Its ironic that software developers create the most complex artifacts of enterprise infrastructure while having the benefit of so little infrastructure themselves. Changing that paradigm—to make the construction of a development infrastructure the norm when establishing an application development center—is more than a matter of acquiring and installing automated project management and testing tools. Its […]

In a 1992 book of cartoons by Sidney Harris titled “Chalk Up Another One,” one of my favorites shows two people walking down a city street. Theyre surrounded by modern artifacts—cars driving by, a jet overhead, a computer in the store window that theyre passing. One person says to the other, “Look, I would say […]

Pardon my dinosaur scales, but I distinctly remember the advent of the relational database as the universal way to store enterprise data with rigor and reusability. That aging conventional wisdom is challenged, to put it politely, by this months release of a database benchmarking research paper from a team that spans MIT, the universities of […]

The runaway success of nintendos motion-sensitive Wii game controller, with December sales of nearly 1 million units, turned out to be merely a prequel to Januarys debut of Apples iPhone: a device that redefines expectations, if not quite yet realities, for handheld device interaction and connectivity. Developers are on notice: The next generation of personal, […]

When president Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair got caught with their microphones on last July in St. Petersburg, Russia, The New York Times blogger Virginia Heffernan posted a clip of CNN video that included their conversation on the soundtrack. Most of the subsequent comments posted on The New York Times site concerned peoples […]

A “killer app” is not always an especially good application. What a killer app needs to be is the right product, at the right time, in the right competitive environment to turn potential into reality for enough users to create a critical mass. With the question “Whats the killer app for Vista?” on the minds […]

Partisans of object-oriented programming, often including myself, often say that the only proper programming model is one of data structures with bundles of associated methods wrapped around them. Yes, algorithms are fascinating things, but ultimately any application thats not just part of someones doctoral thesis is going to do something to something else. Mere data-centric […]

Is any manager-ial platitude more often repeated, and less often observed, than “Whats measured is what matters”? Before you count another line of code written, another percentage point of server uptime or another dollar of infrastructure capital spending, I ask you to spend some time counting the various ways that you measure the efforts you […]

When it comes to the quasi-religious subject of development methods, I try to avoid sectarian violence. I like to think of programming languages, for example, in the same way that I think of wrenches: the all-purpose variety tend to do a wide range of jobs with only mediocre success — but when languages evolve under […]

A day without a new blog entry is a failure to live up to the promise. This medium demands the feel of a conversation, not of a chess game by snail mail — and the WiFi laptop, combined with the public hot spot, is therefore the defining tool of the 21st-century journalist to at least […]