Steve Gillmor

With LotusSphere barely two weeks away, its time once again to disinter IBMs late great Lotus Notes. Already, blogs are heating up with the latest confirmation: Notes is still dead. Too bad IBM has not gone the route of Microsoft with Windows 98, executing a planned obsolescence masked by Suns lawsuit-mandated Java virtual machine-ectomy. Instead, […]

Getting used to the idea of the identity-based economy is job one for both customers and enterprise managers in 2004. This years CES was the kickoff for the iConomy, where users are defined as personal or professional based on the metadata they project to an increasingly powerful set of digital devices. Even the cab drivers […]

LAS VEGAS—In back-to-back keynotes in San Francisco and Las Vegas, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates this week underlined the vanishing difference between consumer and enterprise markets. Convergence has been the password for at least the past two Comdex and CES events, and both Apple and Microsoft are rolling out products loosely based on the notion […]

2003 wont likely go down as a banner year for either messaging or collaboration. Much has been made of the unilateral nature of President Bushs Iraq conflict, and blended threat viruses repeatedly brought e-mail to its knees. But behind the scenes, collaboration technologies such as Groove accelerated our military effectiveness, and 2003 saw the emergence […]

The phenomenon known as the iPod is emerging from the shadows of Napster and the Mac to become a force unto its own. As a designer toy, it offers the promise of mobility, the allure of 21st Century Art Deco and the gratification of impulse buying. But behind the scenes, Apple Computers MP3 device is […]

Suns push into software development under Executive Vice President Jonathan Schwartz has been met with varying degrees of suspicion by analysts, the trade press and, of course, competitors. In a nutshell, the critics fall into two main buckets: those who deride Sun as a hardware vendor with no software skills and those who dont think […]

Disruptive technologies are born for all sorts of reasons—good ideas, market pressure, economic opportunity, and sometimes just plain luck. Many of todays disruptive leaders only emerged when combined with other seemingly unrelated inventions. Wi-Fi and broadband (DSL and cable but not satellite) have prospered in a mutually symbiotic fashion. So too have weblogs and RSS. […]

Predicting the demise of Microsofts flagship office is a little like being a Red Sox fan rooting for an upset of the Yankees. The eternal cry of “Wait til next year” could just as easily emerge from supporters of new challengers such as the Open Source Applications Foundations Chandler or Suns Java Desktop System, joining […]

Warning: The predictions you are about to absorb may be hazardous to your health—that is, if youre locked into an enterprise messaging and collaboration system circa 2000. Lets jump back into the Longhorn time machine and dial back to the immediate aftermath of the Great Y2K Messaging Marketing Migration. Those were the days, when platform […]

With Microsoft aiming for a “Longhorn” ship date in 2006, were all settling in for two years—at least—of messages from Microsoft about how eager we should be for the next generation of Windows and how patient we should be while waiting for it. But Microsoft will have to do better than its done so far […]