Stories about: Vantage Point

For most people, Bill Gates and Microsoft are one and the same. Gates has led Microsoft to global dominance in the 33 years since its founding, combining a strong opportunism -- getting the code for DOS to sell to IBM for the first PC and aping Apple's visual interface for the first Windows are the two best examples of Gates' moving where the wind was soon to blow -- with a steady vision of desktop computers being as powerful as the mainframes that captured techies' imaginations in the 1970s.

As a CIO, you need a solid IT team to help you realize your strategic goals, make you look good in front of your peers, and allow you to focus on the most strategic elements of your job. Without a good team in place, especially at the leadership level, you will have a tough time moving up in the organization.

Microsoft created an imaginary competitor to (Canadian coffee and donut chain) Tim Horton's this week as a way of demonstrating the kind of organization that might use its latest versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio.

The Discovery Channel has launched a cool Web application that gives users a three-dimensional view of planet Earth and lets them manipulate the globe with near-real-time views of the clouds, water vapor and rainfall.

Companies that specialize in helping businesses speed delivery of their applications and Web content are increasingly involving themselves in IT security as the continued proliferation of systems-defense technologies has become a potential roadblock to the performance and quality of the services they already provide.

As part of its Windows 2008 Server reviewers gathering this week in Redmond, Microsoft outlined how it will deliver the editions of the long-awaited Longhorn server with a few surprises.

From AT&T's Global Network Operations Center 40 miles west of New York City, CISO Ed Amoroso has as wide a window into the Internet as anyone. With a glance at a two-story wall covered with computer monitors and television screens, Amoroso can tell at any given moment how much e-mail, Web and voice-over-IP traffic is streaming across AT&T's data networks, buzzing its way from business to business, person to person.

Jeremiah Grossman wants you to know that firewalls and SSL encryption won't prevent a hacker from breaking into your e-commerce website, compromising your customers' data and possibly stealing your money. That's because most website attacks these days exploit bugs in the Web application itself, rather than in the operating system on which the application is running.

For managers of enterprise datacenters, the endless stream of security patches from Microsoft, Oracle, and other software vendors (not to mention open source projects) has been a prime source of frustration. For Blue Lane Technologies, it has provided a golden opportunity.

Formed late last year, CodeGear currently is the developer tools arm of Borland Software but will become a separate company. Early last month, CodeGear announced the appointment of Jim Douglas as CEO. Douglas most recently was president and CEO of ReShape, an electronic design automation startup company. He also has worked at Tality, a spinoff of Cadence Design Systems.

Former Sun Microsystems executive Mark Canepa was named CEO and president of Extreme Networks on Aug. 30. Since then, the company has delayed filing its annual financial report and received notice that it may be delisted from the Nasdaq exchange for delaying its year-end financial filings. In an interview with Computerworld, Canepa talked about those issues, the company's declining revenues and the growing threat of Cisco Systems, which dominates the switching and routing markets for large companies and carriers.