Business currents

For the last decade, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has promoted his pet idea that traditional application software was destined for obsolescence.

He was a few years early, but Benioff understood computer history better than his detractors.

Most of the hosted on-demand application vendors, or ASPs as we called them back then, crashed and burned. Not only did they burn through money at a frightful clip, but the technology they used was thin, relying on single-tenant, non-scalable computing architecture models that left a trail of dissatisfied customers.

In the post-Internet bubble world, however, the proliferation of cheap hardware combined with … Read more

Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored "Information Management: A proposal" and set the technology world on fire?

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not … Read more

OpSource is hosting a very timely conference in San Francisco this week on software-as-a-service. What with the meltdown in the economy and continuing concern about the cost and environmental impact of energy use, there's interest in how cloud computing will impact the IT world.

And what better way to cut through the hype over the so-called green aspects of SaaS than to assemble veteran technologists who might share their experiences with the uninitiated? That's the usual format: People ready to impart knowledge to people eager to receive knowledge.

Good idea but, well, maybe another day.

As I sat … Read more

The fun thing about looking over the shoulders of computer scientists doing product demos isn't necessarily the technology they're pointing to on their computer screens. So many beta programs wind up on the cutting-room floor that it's impossible to predict with much confidence which ones ultimately will transmogrify into hit products. But more often than not, you can find clues about the direction a company wants to head.

So it was that while getting a look Thursday in San Francisco at what IBM Research's been working on, I heard the phrase "social networking" mentioned … Read more

"The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere."

So begins the annual "Internet Enemies" report by Reporters Without Borders--and that's probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.

For the uninitiated, Reporters Without Borders is an anti-censorship watchdog organization. As blogs and news Web sites have grown in popularity, the group's focus has similarly migrated to the Internet. Unfortunately, the report again paints a grim picture of Internet freedoms in parts of the world where it says the authorities regularly chuck bloggers in jail for online posts that displease … Read more

OK, it's California. So we are quite used to the rest of the country rolling their eyes in knowing exasperation at our fads. But often, they turn out to be harbingers of national trends. And so the question: Will AB-255 number among them as well?

Last month California Assemblyman, Joel Anderson, introduced a bill to limit the amount of detail someone could see on screen using online mapping tools. It also calls for fines of up to $250,000 per day for violating what Anderson describes "as the same level of protections that foreign governments extend to their … Read more

On the surface, there's not an immediately apparent link between social-networking software and enterprise computing. But in what it describes as its "biggest launch ever," collaboration software company Jive Software will take a stab with a new suite of social-business applications called Jive SBS 3.0.

The intent is to offer corporate users more ways to tap the knowledge of social connections inside and outside the enterprise. So it is that SBS 3.0 includes a variety of software modules designed to better bridge departments, partners, and customers in a single online community.

Sam Lawrence, the company'… Read more

In recent conversations with IBMers, one theme nearly always came up: this is a big company with deeper pockets than any other company in the tech business. The blunt message: recession or no recession, it's only a matter of time before less well endowed rivals buckle.

Marketing spin, to be sure--but also a reflection of the constellation of forces in an increasingly weakened tech industry. And now, CEO Sam Palmisano has made it official.

In a letter to shareholders released in conjunction with IBM's annual report, Palmisano says that the company is "positioned to lead in the … Read more

The headlines are dreary but parts of the country actually are reporting upticks in demand for IT products and services.

I know. Sounds crazy. What with more than a few on Wall Street ready to contemplate ritual hara-kiri as the economy goes from bad to worse, this sounds implausible. But paging through the Federal Reserve's district-by-district review of current economic conditions, a couple of counterintuitive nuggets suggest that there remain pockets of strength. Consider the following:

•  IT companies serving the districts around Kansas City and Minneapolis describe conditions as "stable to up."

The Minneapolis region particularly … Read more