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Playboy's Bunny Couldn't Make the Hop to the Web November 20, 2009 
What the hell happened to the sort of man who reads Playboy? How could he let the Internet develop into the world's strip club -- and worse -- without taking Hugh Hefner's company along for the ride? There's no long tail for the Playboy bunny, judging from the rumored impending sale of Hefner's company for around $300 million to Iconix, collector of apparel brands like Candies and Joe Boxer.
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The Gphone That Could Catch My Eye November 20, 2009 
So far, I haven't seen a compelling competitor to my iPhone -- at least, for me personally -- and this includes the new Motorola Droid. It's nice enough, but is it so much better that I'd leave the iPhone? Definitely not, and that includes some Droid widescreen envy. But what about the rumored Google phone?
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Breaking Out of the Pink Ghetto November 19, 2009 
The Pink Ghetto is a largely invisible, often unmentioned and unacknowledged place littered with impediments to womens' upward mobility in the workplace. Women in the Pink Ghetto do not get equal pay for equal work, are not offered the same opportunities as their male coworkers, are not promoted as quickly as men -- or promoted at all.
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IT Needs Its Darth Vaders November 17, 2009 
If there were a psychiatrist seated across the room from us, and we were to present to her our feelings about information technology as a force in our lives, her diagnosis would be simple and immediate: We have an obsession. Maybe having nothing to do with technology itself at all, we're obsessed with the notion of a nemesis with an unfair advantage influencing the decisions we make.
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Talk CRM in Language Users Can Understand November 17, 2009 
Those of us immersed in CRM take it for granted that people understand what the acronym stands for and what it really means -- the technology, people and processes that go into building stronger relationships with customers. Quite naturally, the people who sell, support and comment on CRM understand all of that. But do the intended users?
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War and Peace: HP Drops Bomb; Intel and AMD Call Truce November 16, 2009 
We seem to be surrounded by conflict; sometimes it seems peace is harder to make than war. There were two big events in tech last week: HP picked up 3Com, the company that first dominated the network space, as a major shot across Cisco's bow. Also the major legal battle of the decade, between AMD and Intel, came to an end.
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Flu Fear Goes Viral on the Web November 13, 2009 
There's a very good reason why we call Internet memes and themes "viral." Good and bad information spreads on the Web in much the same way those nasty bundles of nucleic acid and proteins do when they attack your body's cells and make you sick. Some of the Internet news items I've seen related to the H1N1 swine flu virus are making me feel a little ill.
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IT's Perfect Storm: Managed Services, SaaS and Cloud Computing November 13, 2009 
In a previous column, I described why many IT professionals within small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as in large-scale enterprises, are beginning to embrace Software as a Service, and why managed service providers can't afford to ignore SaaS. A recent industry event brought my previous observations to life and added a new dimension -- cloud computing -- to these dynamics.
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Apple's House Rules Won't Be the Death of App Development November 13, 2009 
So Facebook developer Joe Hewitt tweets that he's ditching the super-popular Facebook iPhone app, and TechCrunch, clearly sensing there's more to the story here, reaches out to learn why. "My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies," Hewitt told TechCrunch.
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A Tale of Two Sages November 11, 2009 
Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,000 people, but despite that number of people, the place looked underused.
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Mobile CRM User, Know Thyself November 10, 2009 
With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious. However, there are also many ways for CRM to go into the field.
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Betrayals: Obama's Hollywood Sellout, Tech Companies' Layoffs November 09, 2009 
Last week, two troubling trends were in evidence. The scarier one is that it appears the Obama administration is in the process of putting in place a secret antipiracy provision that has little to do with antipiracy and everything to do with killing properties like YouTube. It is truly frightening, and people are already planning civil unrest to stop it.
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Cyber-Meltdown: Managing the Message When IT Hits the Fan November 06, 2009 
It started as an act of Web site defacement by some anti-capitalist zealots, attacking one of Canada's largest multinational corporations. You know the kind -- they've got their fingers in all kinds of business pies, from airplane parts to media content to their own very popular brand of hand sanitizer.
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Let's Give the iPhone Hackers a Big Round of Applause November 06, 2009
I'm the kind of guy who rarely bothers to hack my devices. By "hack," I mean use the hacks and instructions of those who are much more intrepid than I. Tinkering with a device that I shelled out hundreds of dollars for, if not more, isn't something I take lightly. If I break it, I've not only lost usage of the device, I'm out of the money, too. If I had a bigger bank account, I might be more cavalier about it all.
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Free Flow of Internet Traffic Requires Sensible Road Rules November 04, 2009 
Free marketeers' primary argument against Net neutrality is that a government watchdog role in protecting neutrality is bound to be "political" -- and that any government agency will ultimately start a slippery slide to full-bore regulation of the Internet. This all-or-nothing approach is a false choice.
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Windows 7 Takes Back Mac Switchers and Other Reasons for Hope November 02, 2009 
Last month was fascinating for me. Not only was Windows 7 launched, but it appeared last week that because so many Mac users were installing Windows 7, some huge enterprise servers crashed. In addition, I got a chance to see Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz in action, and was both impressed with her and a little disappointed in the event.
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