Scot Petersen

Im not the first to notice that theres a certain relationship between Microsoft and its customers—especially the developers, who enjoy all the benefits of being part of the worlds largest computing community, one that is led by one of the worlds richest and most powerful companies. There are complainers in the group, but, overall, the […]

I always get a little suspicious when some of the worlds richest executives, such as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, take it upon themselves to donate millions of dollars to fund university research centers. The latest is Ellisons decision to fund, at either Harvard or Stanford University, a $150 million “politics, economics and technology” center […]

The summer blockbuster season is upon us, and i dont know about you, but I cant wait. If you cant either, why not just sit back and get your preview of summertime action here: “Perl” Harbor (PG-13): The tranquil setting of this out-of-the-way scripting language is ripped apart as the evil forces of Visual Basic […]

I hope these are the last words I write about Microsoft Office, at least as the giant application suite is currently configured. As strongly as officials in Redmond deny or deflect any notion that XP, the latest version package, is the last of a dying breed, it would be good for all of us—and Microsoft—that […]

One year ago, at a key B2B conference, GroundZero No. 3, attendees were literally fighting for seats at the crowded Boston Park Plaza hotel to hear various vertical marketplace operators explain how they were going to take over the world or at least change it significantly. Six months later, in the midst of the dot-com […]

The good-news, bad-news story we published last week by Peter Galli was bound to ruffle a few feathers in the open-source community. Regardless of how well we positioned the news that a Linux DB2 configuration beat Microsoft SQL Server in TPC benchmarks, the accompanying news of Linuxs continuing struggles on the desktop will be what […]

I can live with long cab lines in 99-degree heat. I can manage making the interminable walk from the 100s of the Las Vegas Convention Centers North Hall to the 8800s of its South Hall in less than 10 minutes. I can even stand very little sleep for three straight days. But the one thing […]

Now that the second season of “Survivor” is over, what are the shows junkies to do? What we need is a high-tech industry version of the show. All of us, in one way or another, seem to be playing a game of survival, either getting voted out by layoffs or bankruptcy or sticking around a […]

New developments in storage over IP are signaling the end of Fibre Channels reign as the high-speed storage interconnect king. In three to five years, experts say, storage-over-IP networks based on the proposed iSCSI specification will push out Fibre Channel, which has suffered from high cost and interoperability issues—two problems iSCSI addresses. To help iSCSI […]

We all have come to take our simple household appliances for granted. Pick up the phone, make a call; put a slice of bread in the toaster, get toast; turn on the TV, veg out. Appliances in the computing world are another matter altogether. The NC—Network Computer—and other computing “appliances” have been pushed at us […]

I dont make a habit of clicking through the links on my default home page, MSN.com (which Im too lazy to change), but every now and then something catches my eye, like “Read Moby Dick in 1 minute.” And so I did. The exercise, produced by Disney.com, is part of the sites Fun for Families […]

It was as recently as last years RSA conference, in San Jose, that Microsofts security “strategy” was a laughingstock—literally. As a speaker tried to persuade attendees of what passed for security in Windows 2000 during an RSA session in January 2000, titters from the audience prompted him to say, “I know. I know. They are […]