Remember Y2K? Remember how all the computers in the world stopped working at midnight? Remember the Congressional congressional hearings, the martial law, the show trials? It didn't happen. Remember .Net? Remember how it threatened the very survival of Windows? Remember HailSHailStorm and its Passport lock-in? Remember the antitrust trials, the breakup, the hijacking of XML? It didn't happen. Journalism is history on the fly. Every day, when we pick up the newspaper, we arrive fresh and innocent, anticipating a new series of facts to advance the story as we last left it.
The bubbles is dead. Long live the Bubble. With reports that AOL Time Warner Chairman Steve Case is stepping down in May, media analysts have finally received the news they've been waiting for. As with another favorite corner-turning myth -- that those who survive now will prosper when the economy comes back in '04 and '05 -- the notion that the worst is over is becoming common wisdom.
The bubbles is dead. Long live the Bubble. With reports that AOL Time Warner Inc. Chairman Steve Case is stepping down in May, media analysts have finally received the news they've been waiting for. As with another favorite corner-turning myth -- that those who survive now will prosper when the economy comes back in '04 and '05 -- the notion that the worst is over is becoming common wisdom.
The last time I saw Mark Lucovsky, at a Next Generation Web Services conference in January, I asked him if he still had a job. "I think so," Microsoft's Hailstorm architect said, "Why? What have you heard?" What I'd heard was the sound of Microsoft software chief Jim Allchin shutting Hailstorm down.
Comdex wouldn't be Comdex without a Tablet PC rollout -- at least for the past several years. The cab lines in Las Vegas may be shorter and the spaces between display booths wider, but the Tablet keeps slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
Blogtrolling continues to reward. Hopefully, one day RSS (Really Slick Syndication) tools will automate information gathering, but for now we have to rely on trusted sources for the daily scoop.
On Wall Street, the canary in the mine shaft for a turnaround is capitulation. It's the tipping point between despair and salvation, when enough people believe the worst is yet to come to fuel the upturn they've given up on.
"There are a series of dynamics in the industry that are yielding some interesting disruptive opportunities." That's what Sun Microsystems Inc. software chief Jonathan Schwartz tells me backstage before his keynote at InfoWorld's Next-Gen Web Services conference two weeks ago. The amount of incremental effort to enter this market is zero."
The conspiracy crowd always has plenty of material to work with, especially when Microsoft Corp. throws a party such as .Net Insecurity Day (see ".Net Insecurity Day" ). Carefully hidden in a sea of disclaimers, goals, aspirations, and promises of standards and trust was one nugget of new information, an initiative code named Greenwich.
Some guys have all the luck. And then there's Bill Gates. With all of the money in the world, he can't buy a break.
The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is out of order. The technical term is broke, busted, clueless -- and now, term-limited. And Norbert Mikula is the Jack Valenti of the Web Services community. What am I saying -- a stooge of the entrenched monopolists? As the world's foremost authority, comedian Professor Irwin Corey says, "No, no, I really mean that."
It came about an hour into SAP CEO Hasso Plattner's keynote at Sapphire 2002 in Orlando, Plattner was talking about the two key issues his company would face in the coming months: speed and cost of ownership. Speed meant responsiveness, he suggested, the ultimate cure for user interface issues. As an example, he attributed Google's success to its rapid query retrieval.
Am I crazy, or did someone add a hyphen to Spider-Man? I instant-messaged InfoWorld Editor At Large Ed
Scannell that question and got a quick reply: "Yes, you are crazy -- but, yes, the hyphen is new. Good
film, though." I knew it! After all, there's no hyphen in Superman. Or is there? Will Super-Man suddenly
start to look acceptable?
At first blush the Gartner conference seemed curiously devoid of any theme. A tour of IBM's Office of the
Future seemed promising at first: movable walls, screens, and desk; tasks broken out on a separate
monitor; an automated projector that positioned a display according to a worker's location and identity
profile.
JavaOne was ahead of the curve in more ways than one this year. Last week's developer conference was forced out of its usual June slot in San Francisco's Moscone Center, throwing the timing of vendor upgrades out of whack. Attendance was down, and the show floor's aisles were wider to conceal the drop in vendor booths.
