Peter Coffee

My view of the services business was first shaped by John Walker, founder of Autodesk. Its a view of unexciting margins, inconsistent quality and overall lack of appeal to the technology entrepreneur—but, today, its the business that IT providers must master. Walkers book about the origin and growth of Autodesk, “The Autodesk File,” is now […]

I cant define “suspicious traffic,” but I know it when I see it. Unfortunately, this human test—with apologies to the late Justice Potter Stewart, who famously applied it to pornography—does not scale cost-effectively to enterprise volumes of potentially sensitive information that requires controls on access or exchange. The future of corporate and personal reputations (not […]

Last year, the best brains in robotics couldnt build a vehicle that traveled more than seven miles without human input. This year, five vehicles finished a 137-mile test course in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys second Grand Challenge competition, and they could probably have kept on going much farther. Does anyone really think that […]

Like the phrase “Personal Computer” after IBM trademarked “IBM PC” in 1981, the generic label of “managed code” has apparently acquired a vendor-specific aura—as I learned from readers comments on my letter of last week. Many readers, it appears, interpreted that endorsement of managed code technology as a declaration of victory for Microsofts .Net over […]

Its hard to admit that youve been doing things wrong, especially when youve gotten really good at it. When a company—or even an entire industry—gets built on the foundation of a fatally flawed idea, something really big and obvious may need to happen before people are willing to move together toward a different approach. I […]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, eWEEK Labs spoke with members of eWEEKs Corporate Partner Advisory Board to determine if the event had changed the scope of their organizations disaster recovery planning. Participating in the roundtable were Kevin Baradet, chief technology officer at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.; […]

Enterprise and academic systems are equally challenged by thickening jungles of system complexity and massive flows of data. Research communities in both worlds are responding with innovative efforts aimed at every level of the IT stack—from the lowest level of logic and memory hardware to the most abstract models of application function and user interaction. […]

The hoped-for economies of outsourced or offshored development will quickly disappear if the code thats produced wont do the job. Successful outsourcing therefore requires upfront investment in adopting, implementing and mastering an infrastructure of design, specification, collaboration, testing and life-cycle support to bring quality code to market in a timely manner. The tools of decentralized […]

Like any other IT novelties, outsourcing and its cosmopolitan cousin, offshoring, have gotten much more than their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. In the quiet that follows the echoes of overstated cost-reduction projections and apocalyptic predictions of the death of U.S. programming skills, software development teams should seek a more accurate perspective. Yes, some developers […]

Sometimes a multifunction device is a brilliant synthesis; sometimes its just a stupid hardware trick. The technical path of least resistance leads more often to the latter destination. Integrating the functions of a PDA with those of a personal communicator is a good example of being technically clever but functionally silly. Yes, it lets me […]