Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Innovation matters, Scott McNealy says. The founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc. says that he will remain committed to a “controversial strategy” in the computing industry: Good research and development can embody in hardware what other companies deliver with armadas of high-priced consultants, and it will provide answers to “large-scale computing problems” that […]

BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Scott McNealy, the chairman, president, chief executive officer and most prominent co-founder still at Sun Microsystems Inc., likened freely distributed open-source code to “unwrapped software.” In an interview with Baseline magazine at the Sun Microsystems John Elway Celebrity Classic golf tournament in a technology-edged suburb of Denver, McNealy said the advent of free software […]

ANAHEIM, Calif.— Technology spending is creeping back, notwithstanding the results of database giant Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft Inc. CEO Craig Conway said Monday. “Oracles results could mean something about technology or they could mean something just about Oracle,” he said in an interview after his keynote speechat PeopleSofts Connect conference. (Conway said he believed the latter, […]

The code-writing is on the screen.Development of software is shifting to India, China and the Philippines.Deployment also is moving out. PeopleSoft has announced the creation of an implementation lab in Bangalore, India, which will integrate software customers want, work out bugs and then send it on for installation. Dell and other systems makers increasingly install […]

NEW YORK—With or without the acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle is “not a competitor which really could hurt” SAP AG, said the chief executive of SAP, the largest supplier of software that helps large enterprises manage their operations. Oracle has not increased its share of the enterprise applications market in the past two years, said SAP […]

This was going to be a complicated set of itineraries. A round-trip N.Y. to Chicago for my son, Zachary, leaving in June and coming back at the end of July. A round-trip to Chicago for myself, leaving in late July and returning on same flight as Zack. A pair of round-trips from Chicago to St. […]

The old rap against academics is: Those who cant do, teach. The enterprise corollary must be: Those who cant market, sue. The latest exemplar is SCO Group, which claims to have obtained the intellectual property that originated with AT&Ts Bell Labs and became the guts of the operating system known as Unix that is now […]

SAN DIEGO, Calif.–The technology spending recovery is coming–next year, says Gartner chief executive Michael Fleischer. “We see a high probability of significant improvement coming to the technology sector in 2004,” Fleischer told attendees of Gartners spring 2003 Symposium and IT Expo. The reasons: Massive delays in upgrading and replacing hardware and software will end. “These […]

“The hottest technology in personal computing is wireless networking,” declared gadgetry guru Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal on this years first day. Speaking personally, hes probably right. Wireless access points are popping up in every conceivable location from Bryant Park outside the New York Public Library to pay services inside Starbucks coffee shops […]

WARNING: The following column is rated MA, for mature audiences. No graphic language, sex, nudity or violence, but the squeamish should skip it. In the unenlightened era of the Internet, when creativity was at such a low ebb and nothing really outlandish was going on, there was Half.com. This is the fixed-price commerce site that […]

On the Internet, latency is a big deal. The amount of time you have to wait for a response to a request you tap onto your keyboard goes a long way toward determining how satisfied you are as an Internet user. Broadband connections may be dimming our recollection of the days when Net access was […]

So theres now a genuine debate over the value of open source software. Its almost coming off like a series of sponsored events. In early May, Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie fires the first shot, at New Yorks Stern School of Business. Then, a week or so ago, Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman […]