Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
I ran into Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation, at a Red Hat press conference (support in Red Hat's Certificate System for smart card detection in the September releases of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0) and asked him about other projects that Mozilla could undertake, such as blogging and wiki projects.
One thing we know for sure is that technology mono/duo/polies (aka: technopolies) are really bad for end users. But, in an FCC ruling that could stifle competition in the business of internet service provision, I have mixed feelings.
By the time marriage of the word "Java" to the phrase "application server" became in-vogue -- giving rise to the acronym J2EE (now being deprecated in favor of Java EE or Java Enterprise Edition) -- BEA was practically a household name in enterprise IT, having seized the early lead in the Java-based app server market. But since the late 1990s, BEA's dominance of the J2EE market has been undermined by commercial and open source competitors such as IBM and JBOSS, respectively.
I used to think of VMware (a part of EMC) as a savvy technology company that figured out something others couldn't. Now the company has also become business and politically savvy in trying to establish VMware as a de facto standard (the default) for virtualization services by allowing partners to access its ESX Server source code and interfaces.
Dana Gardner, formerly a top analyst with the Yankee Group and prior to that the Aberdeen Group, recently started his own consultancy, Interarbor Solutions. He'll be focusing on enterprise applications, software infrastructure, RSS and other topics, and he has agreed to post some of his insights on Between the Lines.
After news reports surfaced last week that Vista's first vulnerabilities were beginning to surface and then ZDNet blogger George Ou pointed out that the culprits were not vulnerabilities but rather malicious code, Paul Thurrott has thoroughly debunked the unfair malignment of the next version of Windows. According to Thurrott, Monad -- the Microsoft Scripting Host (MSH) that's needed to support the malicious code -- isn't in the beta version of Vista.
Reuters reports (from a story in the "Business" newspaper in London) that Cisco might add to its massive networking equipment footprint with Nokia's handsets and wireless infrastructure. Nokia is valued at around $71 billion.
For a long time, because of its failure to hitch its wagon to one of the primary development wagons (Java or .NET), I've been predicting that the PalmOS from PalmSource (the Palm operating system company) is on its way to becoming totally irrelevant if not dead altogether.
With both amusement and horror, I've been following a dispute that has erupted between Continental Airlines and MassPort -- the Massachusetts agency that runs Boston's Logan Airport -- over Continental's installation of a WiFi network that's freely available to some of its customers (for Internet access). Not only has the story turned up all over the Web, but it's made the local papers and television stations here in Massachusetts where I live.
Red Herring has a story about the Department of Defense funding three teams to create the mother of all decoders to monitor and recognize data sources of all kinds (text, audio, video) in multiple languages and translate the relevant info (with 95-percent accuracy) into a language the U.S.