Tech's Bottom Line | Bill Snyder

Does Microsoft have a new search strategy?

Bill Snyder — 2008-07-03T03:00:00-08:00

Microsoft's PowerSet buy is a smart move that will help the stumbling software giant get back in the search game. READ MORE

SAP sticks its head in the ground

Bill Snyder — 2008-06-26T03:00:00-08:00

The contrast between old and new software couldn't have been stronger this week. With his company beset by competition from Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com and with new technologies such as software as a service and cloud computing redefining how enterprises think about software, you'd think SAP's CEO would put on his visionary's hat and talk real strategy. You'd be wrong. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Henning Kagermann airily dismisses software's new direction. His exact words weren't published, but here's the Journal's summary: "That's not to say there isn't a role for software from companies other than the... READ MORE

Red Hat the latest proof that cloud computing is serious business

Bill Snyder — 2008-06-19T04:00:00-08:00

You know a technology is getting some traction when imitators jump into the game. That's the case these days with cloud computing. Just this week, Amazon added Red Hat's JBoss to its EC2 cloud computing platform, and an established hosting service -- ServePath -- jumped into the fray with a version of cloud computing called GoGrid. There's been a spirited argument in IT circles about whether cloud computing is ready for the enterprise. That's still unclear. But there's little doubt that there's room in smaller companies and departments of enterprises to save time and money by using someone else's infrastructure... READ MORE

Businesses saying a stronger no to Vista

Bill Snyder — 2008-06-12T03:00:00-08:00

Hardware costs, driver problems, application incompatibilities, and more -- you've heard the litany of complaints about Windows Vista before, but perhaps you thought IT would roll over and move to Microsoft's new OS as Microsoft expects. You'd be wrong: IT is not moving to Vista, at least not in the numbers the software giant had hoped. A just-released survey by Sanford Bernstein & Co., a Wall Street investment bank, finds that support for (that is, planned adoption of) Vista in small, medium, and large businesses has slipped substantially in the last year. "The inescapable conclusion of our 2008 survey is... READ MORE

Mobile CRM: Beyond the BlackBerry

Bill Snyder — 2008-06-05T03:00:00-08:00

Mobile CRM has been a marginal technology for years. Once a user developed an appetite for more than the basic calendaring and address book functions of the RIM BlackBerry, additional sustenance was in short supply. But now, a Silicon Valley startup and a burst of innovation from more established players, including SAP, are moving us closer to truly mobile customer management. It's about time. Salespeople have always lived on the road, and it makes no end of sense to be able to connect wirelessly with the rich information stored in CRM systems back in the office. Sure, the BlackBerry and... READ MORE

Pointing fingers: The darker and lighter sides of Windows 7

Bill Snyder — 2008-05-29T03:00:00-08:00

It's a classic "good news, bad news" kind of story. Microsoft is finally giving us some hard information about what Windows 7 will look like. And there's much of interest, including wider use of touch-screen technology (more about that later) and news that the new OS kernel won't represent a break from the past. Pointing blame away from Microsoft? But then there's the Windows Advisor. Details are still skimpy, but it appears that the company has a tool in beta that will tell users the source of their operating system problems. (Credit where credit is due. Mary Jo Foley, who... READ MORE

Why open source needs an attitude adjustment

Bill Snyder — 2008-05-22T03:00:00-08:00

Recession be damned. The first quarter of the year saw a record $203.7 million of venture capital flow to young open source companies. You'd think that would be a cause for celebration, but for too many members of the open source community money is, well, icky. I pick that word deliberately, because the snarky elitists who want to keep open source pure -- and poor -- remind me of children. Case in point: MySQL. Not long before the database company was scooped up by Sun, at great profit to the founders and employees, there was a lot of nastiness about... READ MORE

Out in the cold: small businesses' ERP deficit

Bill Snyder — 2008-05-08T03:00:00-08:00

It took the United States just 45 months to defeat the combined forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. It has taken SAP 48 months to get Business ByDesign, its SaaS (software as a service) play for the SMB market, off the ground. And it still isn't ready for prime time. Oracle, meanwhile, doesn't even pretend to care about smaller businesses; CEO Larry Ellison has repeatedly said that it costs too much to go after a relatively low-margin market. And Microsoft? It has a tentative SaaS offering, and just for CRM at that. So small businesses' on-demand ERP options are limited... READ MORE

Don't be a cheapskate, Steve: Keeping XP won't hurt Microsoft's bottom line

Bill Snyder — 2008-05-01T03:00:00-08:00

Virtue may be its own reward when you go to church. But, like it or not, virtue generally takes a backseat to profit in the corporate world. But isn't it nice when the two come together? Case in point: Windows XP, an operating system whose time has not yet passed. At least, we hope not. InfoWorld, of course, has been leading the charge to save XP, and I'm not going to repeat all the reasons that's a good idea. [ If saving XP is revenue-neutral for Microsoft, keeping XP could mean actual big savings for users, argues Galen Gruman. ]... READ MORE

Why enterprise mashups aren't as prominent as the hype

Bill Snyder — 2008-04-24T03:00:00-08:00

I still think "cloud computing" will win the coveted Snidley Buzzword of the Year award, but after checking out the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, it looks like "enterprise mashup" is running a close second. Don't get me wrong. There's an important trend here. But as John Musser, the founder of ProgrammableWeb.com put it in a well-received presentation at the Expo Wednesday, "Beware the hype, but don't ignore." [ Learn more about AJAX and other rich Web app dev tools often used in mashups in our Test Center guide. ] What is a mashup? In essence, it combines multiple... READ MORE

What to do when developers take code snippets with them

Bill Snyder — 2008-04-17T03:00:00-08:00

Every good carpenter has a box of tools he carries from job to job: a hammer of just the right weight, a selection of drill bits, and so on. As he gains experience, his toolbox gets heavier with new, and sometimes specialized, equipment. Similarly, programmers accumulate their own tools as they move from job to job, but these tools are digital and often include snippets of code written over the years. And that can create a problem, says Vishwanath Venugopalan, an enterprise software analyst with the 451 Group. These snippets are often reused unintentionally in a simple cut-and-paste operation without... READ MORE

Battle brewing in the cloud

Bill Snyder — 2008-04-10T03:00:00-08:00

Amazon, better known for peddling books and CDs than selling leading-edge technology, surprised much of the tech world by rolling out, and actually attracting customers to, its version of cloud computing. Sure, there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical -- indeed, cloud computing is one of those technologies that can sound more like a buzzword than a solution to real-world IT problems -- but other players are jumping into the game. And that's good news for business. Competition will force vendors to keep prices low, improve the technology, and, more importantly, prove once and for all whether cloud computing... READ MORE

Open source databases: the 97-pound weakling

Bill Snyder — 2008-04-03T03:00:00-08:00

Linux, Apache, JBoss, and other open source technologies are kicking sand in the faces of the big boys on the operating system and middleware tiers, but when it comes to the database world, open source is still a 97-pound weakling. And despite some heady growth numbers, that's not likely to change anytime soon. One big reason: Tool vendors have yet to catch up. "We advise clients that unless they have very strong IT resources, they should wait at least two years to think about deploying an open source database for mission-critical applications," says Colleen Graham, Gartner's longtime database market analyst.... READ MORE

Multi-core to leave developers in dust?

Bill Snyder — 2008-03-27T03:00:00-08:00

Multi-core chip rivals AMD and Intel have been beating their chests as of late, but to what end, I wonder, as developers labor to keep up. AMD, for one, has fixed the embarrassing flaw that delayed the quad-core Barcelona chip. As Terry Malloy put it in On the Waterfront, so what? Meanwhile, Intel and Microsoft pat themselves on the back because they've donated $20 million to UC Berkley and the University of Illinois to found the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers. Well, it's about time. Why so negative? The dirty little secret (and it's not all that secret) is that... READ MORE

Cloud computing begins to emerge from the haze

Bill Snyder — 2008-03-13T03:00:07-08:00

I hate technology buzzwords. And when I hear one, my impulse is to bat it away like an annoying mosquito. But before you do the same about one of this year's hot buzzwords -- cloud computing -- give it a little more thought. Cloud computing, a concept that can be as airy as its name suggests, is piquing the interest of forward-looking IT execs and attracting sizable investments from players like IBM, Amazon, Akamai, Sun, EMC and Salesforce.com. Sure there's a big helping of hype and plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but a growing number of startups -- and... READ MORE