Peter Coffee

Our Killer Apps list continues to inspire conversation, much of it missing the point that I’m not saying a Killer App is necessarily a good app: only that it appeared at the right time, with the right functionality or appearance thereof, to drive users’ platform choices. No more, no less. But killer apps are nothing […]

If you’re reading this post between the time it’s made and the day after Christmas, you may be on the Geek Shift: you know, the schedule slot that’s populated by people who couldn’t make the appropriate Bambi Eyes about their need to get home and assemble toys or cook the Christmas goose. If so, tell […]

A reader asked me today if I would comment on “e-OK” — as a proposed term meaning “electronically OK,” perhaps as a sort of parallel to the Project Mercury expression “A-OK.” It’s interesting to think of the number of times, in the course of a day, when it might be useful to have a shorthand […]

Promiscuous use of the label “Web 2.0” is the hallmark of the entrepreneurial developer who’s going “ftw” — “for the win,” in Web game parlance. “Web 2.0” is often spoken in the same breath, as if it were what the Spaniards call the “calidad” (the essential quality) of the interactive model often called “Ajax” — […]

The SOAP API to the Google search engine, an archetype of Web service enablement and the soul of the seminal book “Google Hacks,” is apparently on its way to retirement. Developers whose eyes are aglow with the prospect of writing composite applications should consider the difference between Web services as multi-source marketplace–a good thing, but […]

When I saw this morning’s story on the thriving marketplace in unpatched exploit info, two things came to mind: the famous entrepreneurial strategy of selling shovels, blue jeans and other supplies to gold prospectors in the 1840s, and the “Blacknet” scenario of crypto-libertarian engineer and essayist Timothy May. In the justly famous words of the […]

A person might reasonably wonder about a headline like “Small Business Use of Internet to Grow Slightly.” My first reaction was something like, “Perhaps, but does a business that does use the Internet effectively stay small?” If I survey “small business” use of the Internet in Year 0, and again survey “small business” use in […]

My presentation of 25 Killer Applications of All Time is live — and yes, I know about the VB screen wrongly showing the DOS rather than Windows version of the product. Oops. Other comments and nominations are welcome.

Now that youve got it, what are you going to do with it? Thats the question I find myself wanting to ask any number of groups of technology users and providers as our smoothly polished fantasies of the 80s and 90s turn into the roughly hewn realities of the 00s. In application development, developers have […]

A small or midsize business can take some pages from the playbooks of the biggest companies when it comes to going into the market in search of either goods or services. The SMB need not settle for overpriced off-the-shelf offerings but can send out an RFP (request for proposal) that invites a supplier to apply […]

IT people spend much of their time—and invest much of their credibility—putting numbers on things that might or might not happen. Security threats might appear in the wild, or not. Disasters might justify costly contingency planning and backup systems, or not. But year-end peak loads on financial systems, not to mention “Cyber Monday” and other […]

Have you ever seen one of those bumper stickers that says, “The worst day fishing is better than the best day working”? Thats how I feel when I look at todays PCs. The worst PC you can buy today is a great piece of gear, better than what you could buy at any price not […]