Recent Articles
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John Parkinson: Budget Blacks and Blues
In the final quarter of every calendar year I send out a survey to my private research panel asking them about their (or their company’s) technology spending plans for the coming year. The respondents—a 30-year collection of just over 600 friends, acquaintances, ex-colleagues, clients and other contacts in the technology world who are willing to…
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Robert Sutton: The Best-Practices Trap
The argument for adopting “best practices” seems ironclad, at least on the surface. If you want your company to get better, you look at what great companies do (or at least companies that perform better than yours), and then copy it. This assumption is so obvious that most management writers, consultants, software vendors and gurus…
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Lindows Loses Early MS Battle in Netherlands
A Netherlands judge last week granted Microsoft Corp. a preliminary injunction against desktop Linux vendor Lindows.com Inc. and its resellers. The decision by the Amsterdam District Court “orders Lindows.com within eight days of service of this judgment to cease and desist from the infringement of … the WINDOWS trademark … by using the signs “Lindows”,…
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Intel Launches Prescott; 64-Bit Question Unanswered
Intel formally launched its next-generation “Prescott” microprocessor on Sunday, providing slight performance increases over the previous Pentium 4. Intel executives also declined to put to rest rumors of Prescott’s 64-bit capabilities. The Prescott will ship in 3.2-, 3.0-, and 2.8-GHz speed grades beginning on Monday, with supplies of the 3.4-GHz low enough that many system…
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No Free Lunch: Microsoft Fumbles the Patent Ball
Microsoft’s decision to drop the other shoe on Office 2003’s XML schemas may come back to haunt it. News reports of patent filings with New Zealand and the European Union triggered fears that third-party vendors would be prevented from accessing Office documents without licensing the new formats. According to a reply from Mark Martin of…
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Gateway to Buy EMachines
Gateway Inc., which has spent the past year trying to expand beyond its PC-making roots, on Friday announced it was buying privately-held computer-maker eMachines Inc. for about $235 million. Officials with Gateway, in Poway, Calif., said the combined company will create the third-largest computer maker in the country behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.—and eighth…
