Happy Birthday, Personal Computer. Rest in Peace.
Business Insider reminds us that today is the 30th birthday of the original IBM PC: the computer’s brain was a 4.77Mhz Intel 8088 processor (for my younger readers, it’s Mega not Giga) and it had a grand total of 256K RAM (again, it’s not 256 GB, not even MB, but Kilobytes). Yet it was a [...]
Conspiracy Theory: the Vista-ization of Windows 7 has Started…
Three years ago I wrote: Windows Seven in 2010. Does Anyone Still Care? I simply don’t get it: Vista is barely out, nobody seems to like it, CIO’s refuse to upgrade, analyst firms tell them to wait, individual users who tried it switch back to XP, others time their new PC purchase so they can [...]
The GUI is New Again
I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day and, while I don’t usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I’ve been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven’t thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as [...]
You Won’t Have an iPhone moment Without a Brand
I got back from Lotusphere in an interesting frame of mind. On the one hand something kind of amazing is happening. I could tell the Web developer/designers I share an office with that IBM was going to create opportunities for them in its customers. That’s right – the banks, the retailers, the insurance companies, the [...]
At Oracle, Closed May be the New Open. Whither MySQL?
I hope I can be forgiven the cute headline. It speaks to a series of events that were heard in Oracle Open World messaging, where the word “open” appeared much less frequently than in years past. Oracle is fortifying its borders, opening new fronts in its market battles, and slowly closing itself off from some [...]
Windows is the dominant (Java) Developer OS: So what is Microsoft going to do about it?
Tweet Stephen wrote a great post based on data from our new RedMonk analytics platform the other day that set me thinking. Its easy to blithely assume that all developers use Macs these days, but the data doesn’t bear such a thesis out. Briefly, Ian Skerrett of Eclipse asserted that, according to Eclipse’s community survey [...]
HP Slate 500–Big Yawn.
I love my iPad. I hate my iPad. Was preparing to dump it for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, until it turned out to be a 7”-er now. Size matters, after all (or is it just my eyes?). So I got momentarily excited reading about the HP Slate 500 but that was a short moment. The [...]
The death spiral of the WIMPs of our Time
Back in 1989 give or take a year or so, there were two competing DOS-based graphical operating systems and neither one of them was Windows. They were WIMPs, which was the common name for what was eventually called a GUI and is now not called anything by anyone except an…
Goodbye Windows, hello IE9 and the cloud
Microsoft’s next browser, released in beta today, treats websites as applications. By moving the focus of activity up off the desktop into the browser, IE9 concedes the supremacy of cloud computing.
EMC Buys Greenplum – Big Data Realignment Continues
EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, announced today as a cash transaction, reaffirms the obvious: the Big Data tsunami upends conventional wisdom. It has already reshaped the market, spawning the most ferment in the RDBMS (and non-R DBMS via the noSQL players) space in years. When I first posted on Greenplum over a year ago, I said [...]
