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.
You've heard of feature creep? The phenomenon that occurs, usually during the specification phase, when extraneous features somehow work their way into software in such a way that can make the resulting product either too complex or worse, impossible to use?
RedMonk's James Governor has an insightful (as usual) blog post--"Year Zero at Computer Associates. Who says Walruses Can't Dance?
The recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report based on input from security personnel at 24 agencies warned that the federal government is not sufficiently addressing the threats brought by spam, phishing, and spyware.
Although usage of Windows XP in businesses improved to 38 percent of business PCs in the 2005Q1, a recent study shows that nearly four years after that operating system originally shipped (October 2001), it still trails behind its predecessor Windows 2000, found in 48 percent of business PCs. While a 10 percent difference doesn't sound like much, the change only marked a 6.
News.com has a story about how Siemens is looking to derail Microsoft's chances of dominating the IPTV business.
Ex-software executives from Lawson, Hyperion, Oracle, SAS and other companies in the analytics field are heading up a new open source community and company, the Pentaho BI Project. (The Pentaho Indians were responsible for domesticating the West Indian Manatee.
Almost one week has passed since BEA revealed its intentions to become the Switzerland of Services Oriented Architectures (SOAs). And, as with the Apple/Intel announcement, it usually takes about that long for news to sink in and for the dots between several takes on such deals to be connected.
I'm at the Enterprise Ventures 2005 conference in Redwood City, where dozens of enterprise software startups pitch their companies to venture capitalists, interspersed with panels on topics, such as "The Future Yet Unseen: What's Next for Enterprise Software."The panel about the unseen future of enterprise software didn't shed much light on what's next.
Last year, a UK insurance company tested a "pay as you drive" insurance system that uses a GPS receiver package to track exactly what distance a car is driven and set each month's premium accordingly. It's a sensible idea: If you leave your car in the garage for a month, there's no reason why you should be charged the same as someone who drove 500 miles over the same period.
It seems like every week now there's a story about another company losing control of digital identity data. The problem, of course, is that when your identity data is lost by some company, the chances that your identity will be stolen go up.