As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are: 1. Technology Adoption 2. Commercial Innovation 3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2. This entry focuses on the second, Com...

105 A.D. In China, Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Han Dynasty Chinese Imperial Court, invents the world’s first paper from a mixture of bamboo, fish nets, mulberry, and rags. He will eventually become wealthy after he present his paper to the Emperor Han Ho Ti. 1702 The first regularly pr...

Here's an interesting question I got the other day: We are writing code to translate old mainframe business report generation code written in a BASIC-like language to C#. The original language allows "goto" branching from outside of a loop to the interior of a loop, but C# only allows branching the ...

Matt Asay has offered a rather strange post noting that if history had been different the roles of IBM and Microsoft would be reversed. If history were different I’d be George Clooney. It’s not. This is Clooney’s good fortune. Matt’s point is that, in future work, Microso...

Microsoft takes a lot of grief for its stance on Linux, while IBM gets a lot of credit. Extending from that, the industry tends to view IBM as a paragon of open-source virtue while Microsoft plays the role of villain. It struck me today, however, that these roles are, to a certain degree, accidents ...

A bunch of folks have asked me about the recent keynote I gave at the 2009 eComm Conference in San Francisco. Below is a transcript -- definitely take a look at the conference website -- Lee Dryburgh has done a fantastic job of making information available quite widely. *** Sascha: I'm going to do a...

Live blogging The Short and Glorious Life of Web 2.0 presentation at Webstock 09 by Zeitgeist Author and Wired Blogger, Bruce Sterling. Bruce starts by saying, here in New Zealand, we have lost sight of Web 2.0. Mistakes have been made. You think it’s the world of tag clouds, drop shadows and ...

Dennis Schaal, technology editor for Travel Weekly has written some very insightful articles regarding the lack of full content in the GDS (despite the full content agreement signed in 2005) and more recently the termination of the agreement between Farelogix and Sabre. (links requires a subscriptio...

HEALTH MATTERS: A social worker asks a collegue: “What time is it?” The other one answers: “Sorry, don’t know, I have no watch.” The first one: “Never mind! The main thing is that we talked about it.” ———————– ...

IT, Storage, startups Wade Roush wrote: If you ate on your best china every night, flew first class even on puddle jumpers, and habitually drove your Mercedes rather than your minivan to the grocery store, it would be a lot like what most big companies do with their data, according to Tom Cook. More...