Peter Coffee

The Compaq laptop battery pictured here is not especially dangerous by the standards of its genre. But have you ever done the numbers on the energy stored in one of these innocent-looking lumps of hardware? At the batterys bottom left appear the values 14.8 volts and 3.2 ampere-hours. Thats less than 50 watts for a […]

Whatever theyre drinking at Forrester Research, please keep it out of my water. The research companys report on May 17, envisioning what it calls The X Internet, misperceives the Internets advantages and ignores decades of research into effective data presentation. I shudder when I read comments such as, “Imagine a corporate buyer navigating a virtual […]

An application architecture should be like a grand hotel: It should accommodate the convention market of B2B and enterprise applications and also afford more personal convenience to productivity tools. In this hotel scenario, application developers play many roles: The mechanic in the basement, the concierge in the lobby, even the room service staff who leave […]

A sudden death by heart attack earlier this month has taken from us the wit of Douglas Adams, author of the five-volume trilogy (“increasingly inaccurately named,” as the subtitle wryly noted on Volume 5) that began with “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.” It was Adams who conceived the fictitious Sirius Cybernetics Corp., whose complaint […]

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Thus did George Orwell conclude his cautionary parable of Stalinism, “Animal Farm,” in 1946; thus unfolds the battle for the desktop of the forthcoming Windows XP. […]

In the friction-free Internet marketplace, vendors are under constant pressure to match the lowest price that a buyer can find—with at least one supplier, on any given day, having some short-term reason to offer goods below cost. Customers, meanwhile, find themselves getting no more than they pay for, as thinning profit margins leave no room […]

Interaction data from e-business sites is “a gold mine,” asserted a Braun Consulting senior manager, Jeff Schlitt, at the Corporate and e-Business Portals conference in New Orleans this month. I agree, but only if you accept the entire metaphor. Even if the gold is there, its far from pure—and getting it out isnt easy. There […]

Theres a reason why enterprise storage investments are among the least-soft sectors of IT spending. Its almost impossible for any organization to know too much. Even in industry sectors that dont seem strongly data-driven, its knowledge that creates competitive advantage. The strategic assets of a company such as Exxon Mobil Corp. arent so much the […]

The first of May is a common workers holiday, according to labor scholars, because it was once the most common day for strikes and other labor protests. PeopleSoft management, take note. In 1500s Europe, warm spring weather lowered living costs at the same time that new building projects were likely to get under way. Workers […]

The part of your brain that craves pleasure is easily bored. When people get alternating teaspoons of Kool-Aid and water, their brains go into ho-hum mode; when the Kool-Aid comes in an unpredictable pattern, the nucleus accumbens (which seems to drive addictive behavior) pays attention. Maybe thats why IT spending has slowed: The industry has […]