Last year, when Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan told the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee that "an impressive proliferation of new technologies is inducing major shifts in the underlying structure of the American economy," he had information technology in mind.
You may think I'm crazy, but Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson should let Microsoft Corp. go scot-free. After all, he acknowledges in his ruling that he knows of no "abstract or metaphysical assumptions" by which to define a product and a market under the control of a monopoly. You must, he wisely counsels, review each situation. In Microsoft's case, Jackson found one. Yet, by his own logic, the monopoly didn't exist until he defined it.
With an announcement this week from a Silicon Valley service provider, the Internet data center model now stands toe-to-toe on reliability with traditional S/390 glass houses, but without the distance limitations of IBM's Sysplex technology.
The Internet lets companies stay in touch with their customers but at a cost: It can make information technology managers rue the day they launched their corporate Web sites.
Sun Microsystems Inc. yesterday announced its iForce program to help Internet startup companies put their businesses online.
Intranets have attempted to manage corporate knowledge and have failed so far, an analyst warned at this week's Intranet 2000 conference. But users here said they are continuing and expanding their intranet efforts and that legacy and security issues remain the top priorities.
Almost used my floppy disk drive last week. A colleague told me that he wanted to send me a file, but his Internet connection was down. "I don't want to forget, so I'll just pop it on a disk and mail it to you," he said. When I opened his envelope, a CD-ROM fell into my hands. For some reason, I was surprised he had his own CD-ROM burner, vital as it was, considering that his file was 8MB, way too big for the floppy disk I had expected to receive.
The information technology talent crunch has increased the pressure on CIOs to boost their use of outside professional services. Managing those services has become yet another challenge.
Dr. David Nahamoo wants you to keep the Internet at arm's length. And then he wants you to talk to it.
IBM need not fear that its NUMA customers will run to the battlements shouting "Remember Sequent!" in rebellion.
My first job in journalism was for a low-rent publisher on First and Howard in San Francisco, just two blocks east of the Moscone Center, where later this week Microsoft Corp. will stage its anticlimactic unveiling of Windows 2000. When I first worked there in the early 1980s, Moscone wasn't part of the Yerba Buena Gardens, an urban jewel for which the city today is rightly proud. Back then, it was a lone structure in a bad neighborhood that attracted more vandals and graffiti artists than marketers and programmers.
Major computer industry vendors are vying with venture capitalists for stakes in the best technology start-ups - and IT managers could end up benefiting from advances or be left behind the technology curve.
IBM started counting how many of its RS/6000 servers it had shipped late last year and discovered that it had already passed 1 million units. The search for who got the lucky server No. 1 million took the company to Austin, Texas, where Funds Xpress Financial Network had purchased two RS/6000 S80s in August 1999.
Keeping an eye on the courtroom is almost as important as watching Internet developments these days. Sometimes it's frustrating when the courts make idiotic decisions, such as when a judge last year decided that Amazon.com "owned" the one-click checkout procedure for online commerce. We can only hope that this kind of foolishness will be overturned through appeal.
Not unlike the legendary Beach Boys and Huey Lewis and the News, who are entertaining IBM's 4000 independent software vendors, resellers and distributors here this week, IBM is ready to continue rocking and rolling with its venerable AS/400 server in the fast-growing application service provider (ASP) market.