Peter Coffee

Technology transformation can bring forth life in two different ways. The big-bang plan puts everything in place and only then says, “Let there be light.” The primordial-soup plan takes whatever happens to be on hand and jolts it with the lightning bolts of innovation and competitive self-interest. Mere mortals have a better shot at success […]

When people want to tell me what theyre against, I usually counter by asking what theyre for. Only in politics can we say that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: in technology, its much more difficult to find compatible friendships when the only common ground is a shared dislike. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or […]

Web services crossed key thresholds of enterprise acceptance during the last months of 2003, with corporate IT builders expressing dramatically greater interest in using the model for transactions up and down the supply chain as well as for in-house applications. Last fall, Forrester Research Inc. found almost three-fifths of a sample of 75 large corporate […]

The expression “To Drink the Kool-Aid” is probably fixed forever in the lexicon of wry humor despite its grisly origin in the Jonestown, Guyana, mass suicide of 1978. It suggests the wholesale adoption of a group view or behavior, rather than judicious choice among options guided by ones knowledge, research and goals. Even without the […]

In a pivotal moment of the 1999 movie satire “Galaxy Quest,” a starship crew member whos safe on the ship advises another whos facing a massive rock monster to “look around—can you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe?” Developers who have moved beyond the pilot-project stage may find that first-generation Web services tools are on […]

As the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas rang in the new year last week, I found myself thinking that forces over the past decade have conspired to shape consumer and enterprise technologies along very similar lines. Enterprise IT buyers have been told for many years that they cant expect to combine industrial-strength robustness with […]

The end of useful life for Microsoft Corp.s DOS-based versions of Windows is dictated by factors visible and invisible to users—but, in both cases, of crucial importance to enterprise application developers. The DOS-based Windows 9x architecture underlying Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME is clearly incapable of meeting the data- and task-intensive demands of […]

When NBC needed someone to explain the accomplishment of landing the “Spirit” probe on Mars, this past Saturday night, I thought it was appropriate that the engineer they interviewed was one of the missions software specialists. In the live report that I saw from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that member of the mission team made […]

Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder X and Metrowerks Corp.s CodeWarrior Development Studio for Mac OS, the latest development tool sets to arrive for review at eWEEK Labs, attack what we might call the plague of developer choice. The tool options facing an application developer have ballooned enormously beyond what used to be the fairly simple choice […]

Filling a genuine gap in the space of Web services tools, Mindreefs Soapscope 3.0 offers developers expanded facilities for analyzing Web service structure, function and behavior. Soapscope, whose 3.0 upgrade became available this week, at an annual subscription fee of $99, offers multiple views of WSDL documents, ranging from raw XML to a far more […]

Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder X and Metrowerks Corp.s CodeWarrior Development Studio for Mac OS, the latest development tool sets to arrive for review at eWEEK Labs, attack what we might call the plague of developer choice. The tool options facing an application developer have ballooned enormously beyond what used to be the fairly simple choice […]

Data mining can easily turn into a job security program for IT vendors. When a buyer has more money than brains, its in the interest of both the seller and the sucker—excuse me, I mean the customer—to promote the idea that one more budget increase, and a fistful of new correlations, will suddenly reveal a […]