David Coursey

Its bad enough that the humans—if you can call them that—who create viruses and malware are trying to turn our desktops into instruments of their global evildoing. But do they also have to insult our intelligence? Heres a sample of the e-mails Ive been getting over the past few days, dozens of them in several […]

Youd think that by now Microsoft Outlook would be a pretty complete product. And it generally is, except that it doesnt do a number of things that it really ought to. Like these dozen features that are on my list for the next release of Bills Chosen E-Mail Client. I wonder how my list matches […]

Much has been made of the seeming unwillingness of Googles founders to take the company public. Its like they are being dragged kicking and screaming into a multibillion-dollar payday. The lead Googlians say theyre doing the IPO so investors can cash out, but as soon as that happens they will run the company without regard […]

Its an accepted fact that using Microsoft PowerPoint during a meeting immediately lowers the IQ of all present by about 20 points. Average people confronted with a .PPT presentation seem to go simple—with their IQ eventually ending up around room temperature. Recovery takes several hours in a PowerPoint-free environment, at the end of which sufferers […]

Most people have never heard of Symbian. But if you own a high-end smart phone that doesnt have a Palm or Microsoft operating-system label, it almost surely has a Symbian OS inside. So, let me introduce you to Symbian and talk about why so little of its product is available here. For the introduction, let […]

I have seen Microsofts vision of tomorrow, and it both frightens and amazes me. Not long ago, I was in Redmond and had occasion to visit Microsofts Center for Information Work, a demonstration facility thats part of the companys executive briefing center. CIW is not open to the public—its for invited guests only—though Ive encouraged […]

Just as there are theories about how the Earth will eventually meet its end, so there are theories about what will happen to Microsoft someday. Not that the death of a software company—even the software company—is very significant compared with the loss of ones planet, but whatever happens to Microsoft could actually happen in our […]

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the actual end of something occurs a long time after people stopped paying attention? So when the end really does finally come, people just shrug. The latest example is Wednesdays decision of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit—a case that most people believe ended in the U.S. a couple of years […]

One of my big unanswered software questions is why no one has managed to make relational databases simple enough for normal—as opposed to normalized—people to use. I cant be the only person on the planet who needs to create a database that encompasses many-to-many relationships, but isnt a professional database designer. Yet, I have not […]

Recent virus outbreaks only hint at an even more dangerous future, say two security company CEOs I sat down with recently. One was the CEO and co-founder of Zone Labs, Gregor Freund; the other was John Patzakis, CEO of Guidance Software, publisher of computer forensics and incident response applications. While some of todays viruses have […]