Technology
« Previous EntriesApples and whoozits?
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Apple’s profit line has beaten Microsoft’s profit line.
It’s an occasion whose importance rivals one of a bygone era: The day the “Whopper beat the Big Mac,” back when the burger wars were upon us.
Comparing very much of anything having to do with Apple to anything having to do with Microsoft is about as sensible as [...]
Unstructured data design – a modest proposal
Monday, May 24th, 2010If there’s one certainty in our business, it’s that useful, lightweight frameworks turn into bloated, productivity-destroying methodologies.
And so it was with considerable trepidation last week that I suggested we need another methodology, to do for Content Management Systems (CMSs — the technologies we use to manage unstructured information) what normalization and related techniques do for [...]
Unstructured data design – the missing methodology
Monday, May 17th, 2010Microsoft has just announced Office 2010. Surprisingly enough, it has genuinely interesting new features, most of them revolving around SharePoint and support for collaboration.
And, of course, The Cloud, where to Microsoft’s credit, alone among major software vendors its product makes serious use of the PC’s processing power instead of limiting its role to running a [...]
Enterprise technical architecture management — an old new idea
Monday, May 10th, 2010Ever meet someone who just has to have a strong opinion on every subject, whether or not they know anything about it?
Those known for expertise are particularly prone to this ailment. Some of us, having learned one subject in great depth (in my case the behavior of electric fish), use that experience to recognize our [...]
How not to run IT, courtesy of Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple
Monday, May 3rd, 2010When it comes to innovation, IT should lead the enterprise. And the IT industry should set a good example for internal IT.
It hasn’t. Instead it’s delivering award-winning worst practices. The envelopes, please?
Our first winner is Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who gets the Brain Drain Award by (ahem) failing to sufficiently encourage top talent to stay with [...]
Core American Virtues
Monday, April 5th, 2010I’m promoting a new business model: Whole Business Outsourcing (WBO). It’s the next logical step after Full Functional Outsourcing (FFO) and its successor, business process outsourcing (BPO). Here’s our value proposition:
A popular means to personal wealth is to start a company, create the illusion of success, then get rid of it for a large chunk [...]
A Cloud in time
Monday, January 18th, 2010The first article I ever published in InfoWorld began, “Does anyone else find the Gartner Group annoying?”
While no longer a Group, the annoying part is alive and well, as evidenced by its recent prediction, reported in Network World, that by 2012, “Cloud computing will become so pervasive that by 2012, one out of five businesses [...]
State of the industry, 2009
Monday, December 14th, 2009Revenue, cost, and risk.
These are the three goods of business — the three and only three reasons for expending money, effort and attention.
To increase revenue, companies either attract new customers or sell more to the customers it already has. As an alternative, some companies acquire another company to buy its revenue … usually for more [...]
Thesaurus Rexx
Monday, November 9th, 2009An over-quoted but appropriate exchange:
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
- Silver Blaze, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I’m not Sherlock Holmes, and [...]
What if SOA is a mistake?
Monday, November 2nd, 2009What if you decide Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a mistake?
Perhaps you’re concerned it’s a misguided attempt to build applications around generalities instead of specifics. Maybe you think object-oriented (OO) analysis had it right — that building a model of the things that make up a business is better than building a model of its [...]
Bob Lewis is president of 