Peter Coffee

When the latest Disney film, “Treasure Planet,” yielded disappointing revenues for its Thanksgiving weekend opening, the company was quick to let the industry know that it had a recovery plan. As reported by the New York Times, “Disney executives … point out that Treasure Planet is the last of the films to be made using […]

If theres one thing I expect to see at Comdex, its the Sony pavilion filled with PCs and peripherals that make new rules for high-touch design. Sonys near-total absence from this years Comdex floor was one of the shows jarring notes, but smaller companies such as Jetway Computer (www.jetwaycomputer.com) filled the gap with designs like […]

E-mail would become more useful, and less dangerous, if attachments could be kept on a leash and if senders could control privileges such as viewing, printing, saving, copying or forwarding contents. AirZip Document Secure, introduced last month at Comdex in Las Vegas by AirZip (www.airzip.com), “offers remote control of access to information,” as Marketing Director […]

One of the summers most controversial books was Stephen Wolframs “A New Kind of Science,” which has sold a remarkable number of copies for a 1,200-page tome full of mathematical diagrams and expressions. If every equation in a book really does cut its sales in half, as someone once warned physicist Stephen Hawking, then the […]

When the New York Times reported Alan Kays arrival as a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, my eye tripped over that articles description of Kays pioneering work with Smalltalk: “an influential programming language that uses blocks of code, known as objects, that are put together, like the cells that make up the human body, to […]

“Disruptive technology should disrupt your competitors, not your customers,” warned Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, in his keynote at the DCI CRM Leadership Summit last month in San Francisco. Analyzing the introductions of such technologies as voice recognition and digital cameras, Christensen condemned vendors for “competing against consumption”—that is, introducing products that […]

Because he was predicting a trillion-dollar boom in semiconductor spending, National Semiconductor President Brian Halla had a priority position on my Comdex calendar with his keynote speech last Tuesday. Halla sees a series of cycles during the last several decades, each driven by a technical breakthrough that led to a boom—and then a glut—in a […]

Last weeks Comdex trade show, in Las Vegas, offered some startling sights to those of us who remember when this was the signal event of the IT year. The modest “Used Cisco” booth sitting next to the Nokia pavilion, the acupressure massage devices being hawked next door to the Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems exhibits, and […]

LAS VEGAS—Appearing before a Comdex keynote audience that had heard from Microsoft Corp.s Bill Gatesthe night before, Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy was frank about Microsofts strengths. “I give them credit,” he said. “Theyre trying to solve the problem with R&D, as we are—not by darkening the skies with IBM Global Services […]

Offering a new law of technical progress to his Comdex keynote audience this week, National Semiconductor Corp. President and CEO Brian Halla asserted that the cost per bit of Internet connections falls by one-half every year–and that the next boom in semiconductor spending, driven by ubiquitous always-connected devices, will reach its peak growth rate next […]

Microsoft Corp.s .Net application model arrives on skeptical it managers desks in the form of the companys Project Server 2002. Redesigning its category-defining Project application around an XML messaging model, the company has turned its stand-alone personal productivity tool into a data repository and analysis engine for diverse Web services clients. In Project Server 2002, […]

Only once has the IT industry gotten it right in predicting the timing of technology spending—and that was because Y2K compliance efforts were scheduled, whether anyone knew it or not, hundreds of years in advance. With due respect, therefore, for the chance that anyone takes in making any nontrivial IT prediction, eWeek Labs shared a […]