Scot Petersen

You can talk all you want about return on investment, core competencies, strategic initiatives or win-wins. No IT system in your company will really be worth its bits until it passes security muster. Bad news about security is the only constant, along with change, in the technology world. Just this past week, the Mozilla Foundation […]

As they nervously fiddle with their BlackBerrys, users are now looking over their shoulders as a judge gets ready to decide the fate of the wireless e-mail service. Will the service really be forced to shut down? What will I do then? These and other questions are the focus of Senior Editor Carmen Nobels story […]

Rebuilding story No. 1: Electronic Data Systems CEO Michael Jordan has rehung the portrait of founder Ross Perot outside his offices in EDS Plano, Texas, headquarters. Perot has been absent from the company since 1984, as has the spirit of excellence that Perot embodied, Jordan reasoned, and his presence may inspire EDS to a return […]

Online service outages are nothing new. Every service provider from eBay to Google to Microsoft has experienced them—some major, some minor—since the dawn of the Web age. Why then should we care to highlight some of Salesforce.coms recent service disruptions and slowdowns in this weeks issue? Fair question. Since 1999, when former Oracle executive Marc […]

Just when you thought you had the “new HP” figured out, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd is reported to be exploring a deal to acquire a large player in the outsourcing industry, Computer Sciences. HP has been chugging along quite well since Hurd took over for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina in April. Hurds strategy of cutting […]

The days of “gotta get a Dell” seem long gone. Since the Dell Dude left the scene a few years ago, things have not been quite as exciting. The company is still growing revenue at a double-digit pace every quarter—enough for most companies—but when its the low double digits rather than the 25 percent growth […]

Well, 2005 is just about gone. It was only yesterday that many of us stopped writing “04” on our travel and expense forms. The year went by so fast that it almost had the feel of 1997, or even 1999. Tech exploded this year, especially in online search, mobile devices and wireless. At the same […]

Do you sometimes wonder if the world (at least the technology world) is passing us by? Asia is to the 21st century what the United States was to the 20th, but the speed at which China, for instance, is growing makes the late-90s boom seem relatively serene. BEA Systems CEO Alfred Chuang, who is Chinese, […]

Microsoft has gotten a lot of mileage from its “embrace and extend” software strategy over the years. Equally as vital is the companys relentless drive toward tighter integration among its products. Tighter not in the sense of squeezing one more person in the back seat but in making many products work together virtually as one. […]

I always wonder if computer security companies around this time of year take a moment to give thanks to all the malicious hackers and Internet crime syndicates, and to Windows or any other security-challenged piece of software, without which they would not have a reason to be in business. Of course, they also shouldnt forget […]