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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 ...

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 aspects of the problem rather than just the technical ...

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, taxes and moods. It also seems to make budgeting much easier, and it frees up massive amounts of your time -- at least initially.

Phishers are recycling old con games from the analog world and mass marketing them thanks to digital communication, according to Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group in San Jose, California "The Internet has taken what had been a one-on-one con and...

However, industry analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times that although Intel's R&D is weighted toward Itanium, it is not a 64-bit world yet. According to him, the transition to 64-bit probably will take at least five years as applications are rewritten and deployed for this architecture...

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. Granted, small is relative. The leaked code consisted of more lines than I've ever written in my life, but early measurements had it at about 15 percent of Windows 2000. ...

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 and software units. The fact that Apple missed a big opportunity resonates well with the conclusion that was inescapable once we saw how well the iPod did. Apple could have competed very well with PC vendors if it had stepped up to the challenge and not chickened out...

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, IT experts are seeing a difference that many reporters and I don't see anymore. Even the Terrorism Research Center is now tracking the MyDoom virus...

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 fail to actually watch the game because we are too busy eating and talking. It doesn't matter anyway because the two teams playing are generally so mismatched that the outcome is almost always known in the first 15 minutes or so...

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 almost always reelected for another term ...

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 announcement was the partnership between Apple and HP, which will create an HP-branded iPod that will work not only with iTunes, but also with HP's Media Center products based on Microsoft's platform...

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 ...

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. ...

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 and the massive costs associated with keeping software up to date...

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 way it was about five years ago, which isn't accurate. A five-year-old viewpoint wouldn't accurately characterize Apple, HP, Dell or SCO either...

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 online bulletin boards. I have to admit that my first response to the letter was that McBride's brain had taken a trip and left his body behind. But if you throw out the assumption that McBride has completely lost his mind and read between the letter's lines, another story comes out...

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 95. Using that prediction, Steve Case started screaming bloody murder that Microsoft would put him out of business in short order by instantly signing up tens of millions of customers and easily eclipsing AOL...

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 flying around that this would be the last Comdex. But with a reported 50 thousand people at the event, it seems a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water...

For his part, industry analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times that InterTrust Technologies' (now co-owned by Sony and Philips) digital rights management (DRM) patents are some of the most important in e-business After all, Enderle noted, DRM remains a critical part of h...

As I write this, I'm getting ready to leave for Comdex, where I'll moderate a panel on the importance of Microssoft's .NET framework. On the panel will be a bunch of folks representing Oracle, Apache and Microsoft ...