InfoWorld Column: Enterprise Strategies

Enterprise Strategies: Sun’s sweet talk

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 00:00:00 PST

Sun's Greg Papadopoulos shook hands and answered questions in front of the wall-sized panel of white boards he had filled with his charts and diagrams. By the end of his two-hour chat with analysts, he had put a fresh coat of paint on Sun's ages-old tag line, "The network is the computer."

Enterprise Strategies: Waging war on business

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 15:00:00 PST

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In Dallas , the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is running radio ads offering amnesty to businesses. Confess your companywide software piracy before the end of February, the announcer gently offers, and you’ll only have to pay your overdue license fees. That seems reasonable enough, but then the ad turns dark. If you have just one disgruntled ex-employee out there, a BSA spokesperson intones, his call to the BSA could cost you $150,000 for each user it deems unlicensed. One disgruntled ex-employee, one competitor, one vendor that couldn’t sell you a license renewal — a tip’s a tip.

Enterprise Strategies: Company time

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 24 Jan 2003 15:00:00 PST

Technology and economic necessity are making it impossible for people to maintain neatly compartmentalized lives. Employers love that their salaried workers expect to take their work home. Cell phones, BlackBerry handhelds, and notebook computers make commute and travel time productive. More and more workers never completely “punch out.” Employers are enjoying an unprecedented productivity boom, but some are rewarding their best workers with disdain in the form of restrictive technology policies.

Enterprise Strategies: The missing link

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 16:01:00 PST

I'M NO LONGER willing to clip two or three devices to my belt: Ultra-nerd is not the look I'm going for. Yet I have to do that today, not only because each device is only good at certain things, but because their services are neither unified nor business-grade.

Enterprise Strategies: Consolidation fallout

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 16:01:00 PST

PHOTOGRAPHY HAS long been a hobby of mine, and I often carry a camera with me. While driving to Dallas last week, I pulled over to shoot a picture of a shipping warehouse surrounded by trailers parked in neat rows. It's an unremarkable photograph unless you know the story behind the trailers' "CF" logo.

Enterprise Strategies: Brain dumping

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 03 Jan 2003 16:01:00 PST

INTEL'S ANDY GROVE says Moore's Law has hit the wall. Good. We don't need computers that execute an empty loop twice as fast as last year's models. We need software that takes our fast computers beyond their roles as glamorized typewriters and ledgers.

Enterprise Strategies: Tying up loose ends

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 13 Dec 2002 16:01:00 PST

EVEN EXECUTIVES AT huge companies want some downtime during the holidays. Steve Ballmer can't think about work 365 days a year, after all, and surely Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy have homes and families. The top brass doesn't want calls from the office interrupting their scant time off.

Enterprise Strategies: Software goes extinct

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 06 Dec 2002 16:01:00 PST

I AM ADJUSTING to the idea that I cannot own a piece of software.

Enterprise Strategies: Pay when it works

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 16:01:00 PST

A COLLEAGUE OF mine managed an outsourced development project for a major distributor. After three years, the distributor decided that it was never going to meet specifications and pulled the plug. The company said it had done everything right by the terms of the contract, so it wouldn't give back the money paid (several million dollars).

Enterprise Strategies: So long, Wintel

tom_yager@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com (Tom Yager) — Fri, 22 Nov 2002 16:01:00 PST

WINDOWS ON X86-32 hardware has been the de facto safe platform since the release of Windows NT 4.0 in 1996. PC servers still lead the corporate market in value and breadth of configurations, and IT can thank Microsoft, Intel, and AMD for forcing vendors to commoditize everything from fast hard drives to 512MB memory modules.