Interviews

Pieter Poll is Chief Technology Officer at US-based Qwest Communications International, which serves business customers nationally and residential customers in 14 western states with telephone, high-speed Internet, fiber-optic Internet and DirecTV services. The company is also serving as an agent for Verizon Wireless services. Poll talked about his career and the directions Qwest is taking.

John R. Wetsch, WISE program director from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is answering questions about re-entering the IT workforce, taking early retirement, work/life balance, the merits of a tech MBA, and the prospects for IT employment and the overall economy.

Our series on the most popular programming languages continues as we chat to Erlang creator Joe Armstrong

Do you love Microsoft Corp.'s recent TV ads? Hate its "Apple Tax" marketing campaign? Then meet Brad Brooks. As Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing, Brooks approved both campaigns as part of his goal of burnishing Windows 7's image in advance of its October launch (and tarnishing Apple's).

Dave Willmer, the executive director of Robert Half Technology, discusses finding a job in a deep recession.

The idea of an application that supports third-party extensions and add-ons users can download and install in one click may be more applicable to Web browsers than office suites, but the developers at the open source KOffice project have developed such an architecture where all components are modular. TechWorld interviews the marketing coordinator for KOffice, Inge Wallin, to find out where this lesser-known of the open source office suites is headed now version 2.0.0 has arrived and what excites its developers. Building an easy, intuitive, cross-platform, and extensible platform like Firefox is high on the agenda.

The business model used by Oracle and SAP is fundamentally flawed and will lead to their downfall within the next decade, said Technology One chairman Adrian Di Marco.

Our series on the most popular programming languages continues as we chat to Tcl creator John Ousterhout.

IT leader Mark Burnette is an expert in leadership, IT process, compliance, security and cost management who has led two award-winning IT organizations, Burnette answers questions about surviving the economic downturn and returning to school.

Computerworld's investigations into the most widely-used programming languages continues as we chat with Giancarlo Niccolai the creator of the Falcon programming language.

The DataPortability Project tasted early fame in January 2008 when an indignant Robert Scoble joined the group after Facebook canceled the tech celebrity's account for exporting his friends list to Plaxo.

Whether you prefer the term "utility computing" or "the cloud," the industry is headed in that direction, however slowly, and the transition will have a multifaceted impact on IT in some ways productive, others unpleasant. And it will strike to the heart of the very technology professionals who provide a significant chunk of what is today's enterprise IT.

Diana McKenzie, head of the information technology practice at Chicago law firm Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP, has specialized in IT contract law since 1987. On Monday, she spoke with Computerworld about what customers of IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. need to know about contract law as IBM pursues its reported US$6.5 billion bid to acquire Sun.

Today's datacenters are downright cramped, yet forced to continue absorbing more technologies and tapping into the latest trends, all while maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. The current recession makes now the time to glance back for a historical perspective to better understand how to not only survive in this different world but also to best prepare for the future.