Stories by Howard Anderson

CIOs face additional pressures

Last year we talked about CIOs - who are both the masters and the victims of doubletalk and who are under enormous pressure to provide more to their users and at the same time, trying to keep spending under control.

10 reasons why Motorola failed

Warren Buffet once said that when a manager with a great turnaround reputation encounters a company with a reputation for dysfunction, it is the company that will keep its reputation.

Google vs the telcos: the new industry Food Fight

There is nothing we industry pundits love more than a good food fight. Cisco vs. Lucent. Google vs. Microsoft! Intel vs. AMD! Cable vs. Satellite! SAP vs. Oracle! But the Fight of The Future is what is going to happen on your mobile phone and in your home.

The life of a CIO: It's not pretty

Want one of the worst jobs in American industry? Try chief information officer, a job with a lofty title and plenty of land mines, almost all of them more related to Machiavelli than technology.

A cynic rips open source

I chaired an interesting meeting the other day. It was me against senior executives of Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell.

Microsoft vs Cisco: the new clash of the titans

Think of the great rivalries that you know: good vs evil: Hertz vs Avis; Duke vs UNC; Microsoft vs (in order) IBM, Novell, Netscape, AOL, Linux, Google, the Department of Justice, Sun, Sony, the European Commission and now, Cisco.

Game over: Demand is dead

We're screwed. There's no other way to put it. Who's "we"? The network/datacom/telecomms industry. And why are we screwed? Because demand is dead. Kaput. Moribund. Innovation has never been better, and demand has never been worse.

Fifteen products that shook the networking world

Where were you 15 years ago? Just starting out? An embryonic Young Turk? Asking daddy for the car keys? If you were in technology, you were witness to a string of unprecedented advances, each building on the one before. Some were pure technology; others were applications. Applications create stress; stress creates the need for products; products increase the ability to handle volume and lower costs which brings on new applications. So before we look at my choices for the top 15 products of the past 15 years, let's look at the applications and technologies that set the stage.

The 10 Commandments of Trade Show Attendees

I go to more trade shows and seminars than United Van Lines. Even now I am just back from NetWorld+Interop, preparing for Comdex and thinking about ComNet. So I feel eminently qualified to present the 10 immutable laws of trade shows:

Lies Venture Capitalists Tell Entrepreneurs

My last column was about the lies that entrepreneurs tell venture capitalists like me ("Cisco [Systems Inc.] wants to be my strategic partner," "The market is going to $7.2 billion - and we will get 20%," and so on). That piece generated an outpouring of positive reader feedback, so this month, I thought I'd follow up with a list of the Top 10 lies some venture capitalists (not I, of course) tell entrepreneurs:

Iridium's Demise: A Case of Misreading the Market

It was with great sadness that I watched the curtain fall on Iridium a few weeks ago. That day, I received dozens of e-mail congratulations from those who had seen Yankee Group research and my own prognostications going back five years saying the Iridium LLC concept was fatally flawed. But I felt terrible nonetheless.

Gates' Blessing Means It's Time to Run

How do you know when an industry has hit that invisible peak and is going to start its long, inevitable slide downhill? When did we first realize that re-engineering was an overworked bromide? Or that ATM wasn't going to solve every problem known to man? Or that pen-based computing created more problems than it solved? Or that the telephone industry would screw up ISDN beyond belief?