Peter Coffee

In Douglas Adams “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” hapless earthlings learn that laboratory mice have been experimenting on humans while deceiving them into believing the reverse. A similar agenda lies behind Sonys seemingly playful Aibo, the robot dog whose name comes from a Japanese word for “companion.” With its learning abilities, its plug-and-play personality […]

Tiny Node Could Make Connections In director Stanley Kubricks prescient “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke envisioned a spacecraft the length of a football field with a master computer that knew the condition of every system on board. Any engineer would wonder if the wiring for all those sensors made up […]

Microsoft blames this newspaper for the district Court ruling that the company must be broken up. Thats right, kill the messenger. In March, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson reportedly said, “I am not at all comfortable with restructuring the company.” Three months later, thats just what he ordered, apparently attributing his change of heart to “statements […]

At XML Devcon in San Jose, Calif., last month, an attendee asked Ken Norths panel on the future of software development to comment on the continuing need to write ever more new code. Whats happened, he asked, to all the effort to make code more reusable during the past several decades? One member of the […]

The proposed final judgment filed Wednesday by Microsoft Corp. sends several messages at once. By its brevity, compared to the plaintiffs proposed final judgment that seeks to break up the company, the Microsoft filing conveys contempt for the broad sweep of the findings of fact compiled by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Microsoft in effect is […]

For the IT industry competitors who have been rooting for the antitrust punishment of Microsoft Corp., the plaintiffs April 29 filing of a Proposed Final Judgment should be a daunting moment of truth. On the one hand, there is a breathtaking simplicity in the words that describe a tectonic shift in the IT landscape. “Microsoft […]

The software industry is not at risk of inviting government control as a consequence of possible sanctions in Microsoft Corp.s antitrust case. An antitrust violation involves three elements. There must exist monopoly power — the ability to set prices in a market without concern for competitors response. There must be anti-competitive abuse of that power, […]

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jacksons findings of fact reflect serious misunderstandings of the origin of Microsoft Corp.s dominance in PC operating systems. To the extent that his finding of monopoly power is based on these misunderstandings, the rest of his rulings will stand on a shaky foundation. Jackson cites the competitive weakness of […]