Peter Coffee

What the spreadsheet did to propel desktop computing in the 80s, CRM is doing for enterprise systems in the 00s. Its the tool that sells more computation to companies, and its the raw material in which every vertical specialist wants to carve its own image of adding (or seeming to add) strategic value. We swept […]

Few high-profile IT labels have retained their glitz as long as CRM—customer relationship management, an umbrella title for almost every useful thing that can be done with enterprise IT systems. From our vantage point overlooking the universe of IT products and services, eWeek Labs finds it useful to define CRM as the effort to track, […]

Im sorry that this letter is so long—but if Bill Gates is willing to explain his views of the origins and prospects of this industry, in forty-two thousand carefully chosen words, how can anyone who cares about this business not take the time to read what he has to say? And take from it a […]

Wouldnt it be ironic if the processor became a peripheral to the storage device, instead of the other way around? I asked that question at the end of this column eight months ago, and users of Apples iPod are busily turning that conjecture into fact. Refuting many critics, the iPod is turning out to be […]

In court testimony on Monday, Microsofts Bill Gates asserted that the computer industry in 1983 was dominated by vertically integrated providers, but that the industry now is far more competitive across every layer of the IT stack. He illustrated the latter point with this chart. To put it politely, this is a carefully drawn picture. […]

Programmers and hardware, taken together, form a culture that hasnt changed since the Space War game debuted in 1960 at MIT. That culture wants to take a small amount of input and do interesting tricks to produce amazing output, and its been highly successful in following that inclination: Computer games have been the most recession-resistant […]

Over its lifetime, software often falls into a vicious circle: Enhancements make the code more difficult to understand, increasing the likelihood of errors—including errors in the changes meant to repair the previous generation of bugs. Continue until collapse. Containing this software entropy is the mission of re-factoring, the practice of continually seeking out redundancy, identifying […]

Not only does it look like a prop from “Star Trek,” but it also serves up decidedly 21st-century content—in this case, a real-time weather radar view for the ZIP code of choice on a surprisingly clear (if tiny) color screen. Motorolas i95cl communicator was one of the dozens of embedded-Java wireless devices shown to eWeek […]

Theres been lots of comment about this months report on our bad manners—formally titled “Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in America,” produced by Public Agenda for the Pew Charitable Trusts. So far as I know, though, Im the first to point out that reports most glaring oversight. This report ignores a terrible influence […]

One of the best words in the modern technical lexicon is “discoverable.” If were designing software, the word describes features and behaviors that a user can recognize and use without instructions. If were designing networks, the same word applies to resources that announce their presence to anything else that needs them. And if were discussing […]