Peter Coffee

Digital technologies have long since trashed the traditional connection between workmanship, performance and price. Without that connection to maintain natural market behaviors, its going to take original thinking and deliberate effort to avoid losing things that wed be sorry to find ourselves without. The tools of a technical professional—a slide rule, drawing instruments, a durable […]

We take pleasure and pride in releasing today the list of finalists for the fifth annual eWEEK Excellence Awards, honoring a comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure offerings that respond to both the opportunities and the mandates that define the current enterprise IT scene. Developers will note the presence of (in alphabetic order by company) ER/Studio from […]

I shared a panel discussion spotlight this month with Ashwin Rangan, an experienced enterprise CIO, where we cordially disagreed on the pace of technology adoption. Indeed, at one point Rangan suggested that fellow panelist David Jones, a technology director at Microsoft, and I had been imbibing too much IT Kool-Aid. Im sticking to my timetable, […]

After years of striving to limit the damage of downsizing and contain the chaos of malware and spam, theres a sense in the enterprise IT community that its time to start moving forward once more. IT pros are well positioned today to take advantage of ubiquitous broadband and wireless connections and to exploit the affordable […]

With compact, low-cost sensors and capacious memory, “Were getting to a point where we can store everything that happens to a person.” That was the opening observation by Microsoft Senior Vice President Rick Rashid, formerly the director of Microsoft Research, at this months OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Rashid discussed a Microsoft project […]

Warning bells sound in my head when I read or hear any variant on the phrase, “without programming.” Dozens of thousands of Web pages promise to deliver this particular form of something for nothing. I dont buy it, and I dont even think its an attractive promise even if it could be believed. I thought […]

During a Ziff Davis Media Inc. eSeminar on desktop prospects for 64-bit computing March 9, attendees wondered what theyd get from the advent of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s AMD64 or Intel Corp.s EM64T machines with their 64-bit superset of the familiar x86 platform. Windows users at the seminar learned of Microsoft Corp.s March 3 promise […]

Back in the 20th century, I got fed up with poor presentation of IT product tests and specifications. Scanning through tables of numbers, looking down a column for each product or across the row for each of the several criteria—it took too long to figure out which product was best overall. For that matter, it […]

Its not often that a vendor comes right out and says, “Most of what I sell, you can probably get from my competitors.” Even when everyone knows that an industry is largely commoditized, most people pretend that their version of the same basic stuff is better all around. That refreshingly candid comment came up, though, […]

When people talk about “conversational” Web services, I wonder if theyre familiar with conversational Klingon. In that fictional language from the Star Trek universe, theres no such thing as a greeting: the closest thing to “hello,” its said, literally translates to something like “What do you want?” A finer point of usage is that Klingon […]

Software patents, in the idiom of the Star Wars saga, are the Dark Side of the Force. If everyone would forswear their power to destroy, the universe would be a better place—but that happy state is dangerously unstable. As soon as even one of the defenders of peace and justice falls into the vortex of […]

At what point does one draw the line between an enterprise IT application and an embedded system? Or is the question itself outdated, as these two once-separate domains converge? We all know the characteristics of enterprise IT applications. They address a business requirement. Their design emphasizes maintainability of code rather than low-level hardware optimization. They […]