Peter Coffee

IT buyers expect CRM efforts to unify customer contact processes and sharpen their competitive edge, help them retain customers, and identify and acquire new customers. So said several hundred participants at a Ziff Davis Media eSeminar, “Best Practices for Customer Relationship Management,” convened earlier this month and available in archive form at www.webseminarslive.com. Alternative CRM […]

Steve McConnells 1993 book, “Code Complete,” is one of the few software development titles that a huge fraction of programmers claim to have read. Its second edition is due in June, and impatient coders overfilled a ballroom at the Santa Clara (Calif.) Convention Center when McConnell previewed his updated thoughts at the Software Development West […]

“BDUF-YAGN” is not yet a popular acronym, but it characterizes the pendulum-swing behavior of software development fads. So suggested Steve McConnell, chief software engineer at Construx Software and acclaimed author of “Code Complete” and other highly regarded books on development practices, during his standing-room-only keynote speech at the Software Development West conference earlier this month. […]

This weeks European Union ruling, concerning charges that Microsoft has abused its market power, has resurrected questions about the companys conduct that have been largely ignored for more than a year. Looking back over columns and news analyses that I wrote at various points of the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft, I find that some […]

A reader of these letters asked me last week if I had noticed the formal naming of Microsofts next-generation development environment, now designated on a company Web site as “Visual Studio 2005 (formerly referred to as Visual Studio codename Whidbey).” He asked what I thought about the disappearance of “.Net” from the current “Visual Studio […]

In this 25th anniversary year of the PC spreadsheet, we can be proud of the progress weve made in decision technology. We can also be appalled by the stagnation of our decision-making practices. The things we learned to do badly in 1979, upon the debut of VisiCalc, we mostly continue to do wrong today. IT […]

This letter coincides with the 2004 Software Development Conference in Santa Clara, where Ill be taking part in a Monday evening panel discussion on “The Marriage of SQL, XML, Web Services and Grids.” Moderated by the estimable Ken North, the session will offer viewpoints from Sun, BEA, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in addition to whatever […]

Command-line skills confer the power to speak to the machine. Despite a decade of effort to replace the DOS or Unix command prompt with a point-and-click user interface, fluency at the command line still streamlines many operations. Its welcome news, then, that Microsofts “Longhorn” initiative includes major improvements in commanding system actions. In the 1980s, […]

Open-Source software “has proved to be amazingly good at commoditizing IT infrastructure,” said Red Hat fellow Jeff Law in remarks last month at Utah State Universitys annual Partners in Business IT seminar. Addressing some 200 regional business leaders at the universitys Logan, Utah, campus, Law reviewed the fundamentals of open-source licensing and collaborative practice, offering […]

Its conventional wisdom to say, “whats measured is what matters,” and its clearly useful to define IT goals in measurable terms. Thats not the same thing, though, as saying that something matters just because its measurable. An IT bulls-eye is a dubious achievement if it hits an irrelevant target. I heard a tale of poor […]