Any time you hear an enterprise software vendor wax philosophical about the tremendous economic impact his company's products are having on customers, odds are good that the executive in question only spends time with a highly select minority of their customer base.
It has been frequently said that the only thing certain in life is death and taxes. In the land of Microsoft, taxation is now referred to as Software Assurance, in which you pay an annual fee up front in expectation of services regardless of their quality or whether you want them.
With any new technology, it becomes fashionable in some quarters to counter the hype and hyperbole surrounding it with an equal amount of disdain when that technology fails to change every aspect of the world as we know it in 12 months or less.
By now we're all used to the idea that Microsoft's client strategy is always tinged with a little proprietary hypocrisy, but its browser and Java support shenanigans pale in comparison to the backpedalling revision that today characterises Microsoft's Office and Windows client strategy.
Dear Mr Chief Software Architect of Microsoft:
Not since the days when Microsoft started converting developers from OS/2 to Windows have developers been so heavily courted by the major vendors.
With the current US economic climate and the collective stress that it brings, volunteering for charity may be the furthest thing from our minds given the number of hours we already work.
When it comes to power politics, Machiavelli was an amateur compared to IBM.
The trouble with enterprise applications is that they are expensive, inflexible and no two deployments are the same.
There are two major strategic efforts within most IT organizations -- largely born of the events surrounding Sept. 11 -- that are, oddly enough, working at cross-purposes.
When it comes to security, we have met the enemy and it is most definitely us.
There’s a new wave of activism in IT circles that is long overdue. The first hint of this new-found sense of confidence among IT executives was manifested in the formation of the Liberty Alliance, which seeks to ensure that standards around identity management remain open.
Everybody in this industry seems to be waiting for something that may never happen again. That thing, of course, is a general turnaround in the economy that lifts all sectors.
As the new boss of Sun's software efforts, Jonathan Schwartz arguably has the toughest job in the industry.
Back in the 1950s with a Republican president named Dwight D. Eisenhower guiding the policies of the nation, the U.S. government took on the task of building out the U.S. highway infrastructure. At the time, the argument made was that an interstate transportation system was vital to national defense. Of course, the United States has yet to be invaded by a foreign government, but the investment in the highway system has paid for itself 100 times over because it boosted interstate commerce.