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Last week I flew down to the launch of the new Starbucks music service and got far more out of the event than a cup of coffee and some free music. I got a sense of why Starbucks is as successful as it is and why HP is suddenly emerging as the company to beat in the technology space. I also went away...
As I write this column, I am at an amazing conference session full of attendees who are influencing the world. Ranging from marketing executives to media consultants to top journalists, these people have influence over the perceptions that shape our reality. This is history in the making, and I'm in...
I sit on a lot of PC company advisory boards, and, while this may surprise you, I actually point out Apple's competitive advantages on a regular basis. The problem for me is Apple's market share, which is at a tiny and stable 2.6 percent of the PC marketplace. Don't get me wrong, Dell is where Apple...
Last week at the RSA conference in soggy California, Microsoft presented the most comprehensive plan I've ever seen to address a security problem. Granted, they currently have massive exposure, but it caused me to wonder what would happen if everyone followed their lead and focused on the human aspe...
When I first moved into management, I was a big fan of outsourcing. It has huge advantages if your eye is on the next higher job. It removes -- almost immediately -- the vast complexities of managing lots of people, and in most countries that includes racial issues, sexual issues, benefits, unions, ...
In case you live on the moon, what happened last week was that a small amount of Microsoft source code was leaked to the Web. Microsoft eventually confirmed the leak, but that hasn't stopped the barrage of commentary from the open-source community, which waxed eloquent on why the exposure of Microso...
This week, we will get one of the best views on how well the separation between the Palm hardware and software units is going, and, coincidentally, we'll also get yet another view of what probably would have happened had Apple taken a similar risk a few years ago and separated itself into hardware a...
Last Thursday morning, the topic on the Today Show was the MyDoom worm. Matt Lauer, one of the show's two anchors, was interviewing an Internet expert and asked a question near and dear to my own heart: "Is this new virus cyberterrorism?" The expert said no, it was more like cyber vandalism. Clearly...
At this time of year in the United States we have a tradition: It is called Super Bowl Sunday. In this annual tradition, we spend prodigious sums of money to have an extremely large TV installed in our homes, have lots of friends over to watch a bunch of guys run up and down a big lawn, and then fai...
Here in the United States, we are in the midst of regularly scheduled insanity where, as part of the process to elect our top government official, the party that opposes the current administration does its best to discredit all of its eligible candidates and then wonders why a sitting president is a...
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas every year is perhaps the most exciting show for the technology enthusiast to attend. There were several high-profile announcements made during the show -- and some were only made to a select number of analysts. Perhaps the biggest public announc...
As the market starts ramping up for what is likely to be a resurgence in IT spending and a mass attack on the consumer by every technology company on the planet, there will be a few key battles to watch this year. Some will go a long way toward defining the rest of the decade. For starters, the tech...
Making a set of New Year's resolutions for myself is certainly helpful but generally not nearly as much fun as making them for others. The year 2003 has been a time of change. It has brought a lot of exciting new experiences for me, and, frankly, I'd like fewer of them in 2004. It is at this time of...
Through much of the year I hear complaints about personal computers -- whether they are running Windows or the relatively rare alternatives. These complaints are typically about systems reliability, the costs resulting from migrating employees to new hardware, the cost associated with new employees ...
I spent the middle part of last week at Microsoft headquarters. For the first time in a long while, I saw an energy that few firms I've covered or worked for have been able to match. It struck me that most of the folks who disagree with my perspective about Microsoft are thinking of the company the ...
Last week was looking relatively uneventful until I got a copy of SCO CEO Darl McBride's "Open Letter" in which he argues that the Linux GPL is unconstitutional. Now, for some of you, you red-lined the letter and spent the next several hours posting your pronounced disagreement with this position to...
We are a few days from the launch of the new MSN, so it seems appropriate to take a look back at the history of this property to get a better sense of what really didn't happen. Back in 1995, I was working for Dataquest where I made an aggressive prediction about how many users would adopt Windows 9...
I spent several days at Comdex last week. If you were there -- and you work as a systems builder, a parts vendor or an analyst -- Comdex was a great show. If you work as an IT executive, you were probably disappointed because the show set IT expectations that it didn't fulfill. As usual, rumors were...
One of the things I have to do on a regular basis is what-if analysis. In this kind of analysis, you make the assumption that something that is possible actually happens, you describe the future world that results, and then you develop a strategy to deal with that outcome. It's actually quite a bit ...
While I was at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last month, I finished Merrill R. Chapman's book In Search of Stupidity. In the book, from the perspective of an insider, he lays out the mistakes other companies have made to contribute inadvertently to the dominance of Microsoft. While ...
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