Peter Coffee

On a recent episode of “NYPD Blue,” a harried detective tried to look up a telephone number by tapping a stylus on a handheld PDA. “Ill take a hammer to this thing before Easter,” he muttered. Such is the fate of too many efforts to introduce mobile work force automation. The difference between what sounds […]

Its fatal to fall behind the leading edge of it, just as it would be fatal not to know about overnight delivery. Both atoms and bits have to get there when theyre needed, just to keep you in the game. Thats why a halfhearted IT budget isnt a cost-cutting gambit; its a postdated suicide note. […]

Microsoft Corp. is showing no signs of softening its stance on the open-source software movement. In fact, executives with the Redmond, Wash., company have turned up the rhetoric in recent weeks about the Linux operating system and the open-source movement in general. CEO Steve Ballmer began the discussion two weeks ago when he said he […]

Microsoft should fire everyone involved in its “Goodbye Blue Screen” advertisement. Im talking about the two-page ad that reproduces a Windows 95 “fatal exception” display, inviting readers to tape this image over their computer screens “if you find yourself missing the downtime.” What were they thinking? Can you imagine Toyota advertising its Lexus sedans as […]

Software developers live in an uneasy partnership with wizards, as Microsoft calls its automated tools that streamline coding tasks. Much-needed productivity gains come at the price of doing things the wizards way or making tedious manual adjustments after the wizards work is done. Promoting the developer to senior partner is the mission of Gen, a […]

What users want is not more features on their desktops, but richer services on corporate and Internet servers. Competitive advantage is coming from distributed applications, with computationally intensive database operations at the hub and small, cheap but responsive clients on the spokes of the IT wheel. Tight code is back in vogue, and hardware prices […]

With the entire pacific Northwest region now facing power problems, long-standing preparedness guidelines for earthquake-prone Southern California are becoming excellent IT advice. Standby power supplies, backup offsite systems (we mean way offsite—say, in Kansas), and fallback technology (radio and telephone/fax as well as IT-based communication portals) should all be part of an IT administrators arsenal. […]

You cant own knowledge, but you can patent software. Tens of thousands of software patents are issued every year, and patents—unlike copyrights—cant be evaded by “clean room” programming. If the idea is patented, the patent holder owns it even if you “invented” the same thing with no knowledge of that prior work. The threat of […]

Im suspicious of incremental strategies. they remind me of the visionary man-ape in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” whose plan for reaching the moon began with finding a taller tree to climb. What looks like the first, easiest step toward a goal may actually make the rest of the journey more difficult. Eventually, youll need a […]

It costs a bit too much, its battery doesnt last quite long enough, its a little too bulky to forget that you have it—but its tantalizingly close to being acceptable on all three counts. Does this sound familiar? Ten years ago, we might have been talking about portable computers, but their rate of improvement has […]

At the end of 1999, ibms 7 percent revenue growth was “stuck at an Old Economy rate,” in the dismissive phrase of a popular business weekly. At the end of last year, IBMs 6 percent growth was suddenly “a stark contrast to the slumping tech sector,” as noted by a major metropolitan newspaper. What a […]

Large-scale corporate deployment of low-cost Linux desktop systems could move into the mainstream by the end of this quarter, propelled by Borland Software Corp.s release of its long-awaited Kylix, a rapid application development environment closely resembling Borlands Object Pascal-based Delphi. eWeek Labs examined Kylix in late-prerelease form, before its public unveiling at Linux World in […]