Steve Gillmor

Its JavaOne time again this week in San Francisco, and for once its an apt title. Is Java one, or is it a train wreck waiting to happen in grand Unix Balkanization style? Framed in the usual debate between the open-source and open-standards crowds, Java is commonly portrayed as a proprietary wedge struggling for relevance […]

Pressure has been building on Sun Microsystems for months, if not years, to address open-sourcing Java. In an open letter to Suns Rob Gingell, IBMs Rod Smith offered to help Sun move toward that goal. Now, Sun is hosting a debate on the issue at its annual JavaOne developer conference this week in San Francisco. […]

A few weeks ago, the SciFi Channel broadcast a four-part miniseries involving time travel. I am a sucker for time-travel stories, to a certain point. That point is where the designated deliverer of exposition calls up the Great Guiding Principle of time-travel projects, wherein the immutable laws of screwing around with time dictate that nothing […]

In his speech at BEAs eworld conference in San Francisco, open-source activist and publisher Tim OReilly described Microsofts defunct HailStorm project as a good idea from the wrong company. HailStorms notion of a massive in-memory cloud of XML data and metadata was doomed, not by the daunting mechanics of schematizing a broad set of generic […]

At Borland Software Corp., Microsoft Corp., his startup Crossgain and now as chief architect at BEA Systems Inc., Adam Bosworth has shepherded more than his share of XML and Internet standards. Now, with his WebLogic Workshop framework released as the open-source Beehive project, Bosworth is setting his sights on extending the browser via the Alchemy […]

According to a Gartner statistic cited at this weeks INBOX conference in San Jose, Calif., 75 percent of all knowledge assets exist in e-mail. E-mail is a corporate asset, goes the logic. And a corporate liability, too, as Microsoft famously discovered. These days, you almost need an attorney on retainer to open your e-mail. Remember […]

Bill Gates chose carefully his first public comments on RSS and the tectonic shift its rending across the technology landscape. The audience was not a roomful of geeks at VSLive, not a consumer-facing keynote crowd at CES, not even a developer conference like this weeks TechEd. Instead, it was bridge partner Warren Buffet and other […]

With IBM Workplaces new rich-client strategy, Big Blue appears ready to challenge Microsoft for control of its core platform. No, not Windows. And no, not Office, either. Instead, the battle has been joined at Redmonds most vulnerable spot: software as a hosted service. In this attack, IBM has endorsed and bootstrapped Suns JDS (Java Desktop […]

Over the past two weeks, there have been dramatic shifts in the Weblog software landscape. First, Google announced a brand new, “easy-to-use” version of its Blogger Web-based blogging tool last week—the first new version since Google acquired the company in February 2003. SixApart then announced a new licensing scheme for its Movable Type software, creating […]

When IBM shook up the collaborative desktop with its Workplace cross-platform, rich-client strategy, the reverberations were felt all the way from Redmond, Wash., to Silicon Valley. In a conversation with eWEEKs Steve Gillmor, Ken Bisconti, vice president of Lotus Workplace technologies at IBM, details Big Blues new client middleware stack. Whats the goal of the […]

A sure sign of Googles ascendancy in the technology firmament is the swooshing sound of black helicopters circling the search services impending IPO. Conspiracy theories—once the province of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNealy or Larry Ellison—now hover over Sergei Brin and Larry Pages latest experiment-cum-product, Gmail. The issue: Gmails free Web mail service threatens […]

The old saw is that Microsoft only gets things right on the second or third try. Only with Windows 3.0 did momentum begin to build for the transition from DOS to GUI. On the application side, remember Internet Explorer 1.0? I dont. It wasnt until IE 4 that I finally switched away from Netscape Navigator. […]