David Coursey

Fifteen years ago this week, the world received what has turned out to be a most wonderful Christmas present: WorldWideWeb, the very first Web browser. Actually, the program was a combined browser-editor, devised by Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton working in Switzerland at the time. WorldWideWeb was, in 1990, the only way to view the Web, […]

New Vista Beta? Bah, Humbug! The problem is not with your eyes. That is, if youve looked at our 37 slides depicting the latest and best version of Windows Vista and arent too terribly impressed, its not your eyes that are fooling you. Youre looking at whats there and reacting quite reasonably. After seeing our […]

What a difference 10 days can make. Earlier this month, it appeared as though Microsoft and AOL were going to pair off, the Time Warner business unit shedding its old ties with Google for new ones with MSN Search. At the time, rumor had it that no large sums would change hands. Well, a large […]

There was a small ruckus created earlier this week when Microsofts Jeff Ressler said Exchange Server didnt face much of a threat from open-source competitors. “We still worry more about Lotus than about the open-source providers, a lot of whom dont have a unified strategy [for trying] to try and address the bigger players in […]

It will be interesting to see how many of Exchange 12s new features, particularly those intended to make the mail server more secure, end up being part of the Exchange servers we already own. Should we really have to wait until early 2007 and then be forced to buy and install a new server just […]

The flap over the man who spoofed the Wikipedia with a bogus entry claiming a journalist was involved in both Kennedy assassinations and spent 13 years living in the Soviet Union is a powerful indictment of what Im calling “open source” content. There is a stupid notion going around that the news media would be […]

The rumored arrangement—its hard to say whether it rises to the level of being an actual “deal”—between Microsoft and Time Warner, apparently to build an advertising network atop Microsofts AdCenter delivery platform, reminds me of two things and points out a third: 1. My enemys enemy is still a potential good friend. Both Microsoft and […]

Greg Aharonian, who follows patents pretty closely, says there is probably a book to be written about the four-year battle between Research in Motion and NTP Inc. that now, at least theoretically, threatens e-mail service to 3.5 million BlackBerry users. Aharonian is editor of the Internet Patent News Service e-mail list, and I called him […]

When people stop whining that Microsoft isnt becoming an open source company, Ill be able to stop writing columns like this one, in which I will (again) patiently explain that people who are expecting Bill Gates to become Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman are bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, people who want […]

Microsofts decision to submit its Office 12 file formats for adoption as formal standards has the spinmeisters working overtime. Id like to offer my own interpretation: Just because Microsoft is “opening” its formats doesnt mean Redmond has to consider anyone elses opinion about how they evolve. I say this because Ive seen comments from Microsoft […]