Monday, December 28, 2009

Firing Steve Ballmer

IF you were a Microsoft stockholder, would you fire Steve Ballmer?  Newsweek predicts you will, just as Ballmer marks his 10th anniversary as chief executive at the software giant.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Odds and ends

IT’S time once again to take stock of the year in technology and figure out what’s in store as 2009 approaches.

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Monday, November 24, 2008

Industry in flux

I was sad—but none too surprised—to learn that PC Magazine, once a heavyweight in technology publishing, would stop printing next year, another casualty in a rapidly changing industry. Back in the day when processor speed was measured in megahertz and a megabyte of memory was more than most people had, PC Magazine was required reading for anyone tracking the rise of personal computers. In the early 1980s, the magazine practically invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews and quickly developed a reputation as a leading source of information about PC and PC-related products.

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Part of our history

MOST people who pass Manila City Hall every day hardly pay attention to the the old clock tower that rises above it. The beige structure with two red clock faces capped by a brick-red dome is a fixture, a decades-old landmark from another era. Fewer people, still, will realize that the clock tower was put there by a pioneer of the technology business—IBM.

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Monday, February 11, 2008

A bad idea in so many ways

MICROSOFT’S buyout of Yahoo! would be bad for the Internet pioneer, tens of millions of its users and the industry as a whole. Fortunately, Yahoo was expected to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6-billion takeover offer, but don’t count the software giant out just yet. It can still sweeten the pot or take the case directly to Yahoo’s shareholders.

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Monday, January 07, 2008

Detours in a revolution

THE One Laptop per Child project had hoped to persuade governments in developing countries to buy millions of XOs and hand them out as educational tools, but that has not happened in a big way for a number of reasons. What’s more, products such as the Classmate PC and the Asus Eee PC—a Linux machine with a less cryptic interface—compete for much the same educational market, so it is far from certain that the XO will lead the revolution Negroponte envisioned.

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Two of us

SOMEWHERE in the junkyard that I call my home office, there’s an issue of Fortune magazine circa August 1991. On the cover are two of the most recognizable faces in the computer industry, even today: Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. In the cover story, Gates, then only 35, and Jobs, 36, spoke of the future of the personal computer. To put things in perspective, Windows 95 was still four years away, and Jobs had been kicked out of Apple and struggling with his workstation company, Next. The iPod was still 10 years away. It was, as far as I can tell, the last time the two industry icons were interviewed together, until the All Things Digital 5 conference last May 30—or some 15 years later—organized by the venerable Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.

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Monday, January 01, 2007

A tricky business

THIS is the time of the year when many industry experts gaze into their crystal balls to predict what’s coming up in technology.  A few weeks ago, the research company Gartner jumped the gun on everyone and offered its 10 top predictions for the years ahead. Blogging, Gartner said, would peak at 100 million Web journals this year then level off. The numbers tend to bear Gartner out, at least on the number of blogs. By the end of 2006, blog watcher Technorati was tracking 63.2 million Web journals. Since about 175,000 new blogs are created every day, some 5.25 million are added to this figure every month. At this rate, we ought to hit 100 million blogs by July 2007. Gartner’s prediction that these numbers will taper off is a bit trickier, as it assumes that the number of blogs dying off will reach or exceed 175,000 a day after July. 

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Monday, October 23, 2006

DOS daze

Wordstar 4 running on a Mac iBook

MANY young computer users who grew up using Windows never experienced DOS or character-based computing. In 2001, when Bill Gates launched Windows XP, he also declared the end of the DOS era. Unlike all earlier versions of Windows, XP would no longer have DOS running underneath. Still, old habits die hard, and a surprising number of people still run DOS applications even today. 

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

25 Greatest PCs—Not!

TO mark the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC, the editors of PC World have just run an article called The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time. It says it based its list on four winning qualities: innovation, impact, industrial design and “intangibles.” Inconceivably, they have left out the Commodore 64, the world’s best-selling computer—with 30 million units sold. This has certainly reduced my estimation of PC World considerably. The editors have made an awful mistake.

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Monday, August 14, 2006

Alive and well at 25

AS I was installing a combo CD burner and formatting a 250-gigabyte hard disk on my daughter’s personal computer over the weekend, I had plenty of time to muse about just how far we’ve come since the original IBM PC was introduced 25 years ago this month. The IBM PC, launched on Aug. 12, 1981, didn’t even have a hard disk. Programs and data were stored on cassette tapes, and a floppy drive was optional. Memory started at 16 kilobytes (kB) and the processor was an Intel 8088 running at 4.77 megahertz. The Color Graphics Adapter video card produced screens that were plain ugly even compared with home computers of the day such as the Commodore 64. Users would have to wait two years for the next model, the PC XT, to get a built-in 10-megabyte hard disk. 

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Monday, March 29, 2004

Philippines marks 10 years on the Internet

Ten years to the day after connecting to the Internet, the Philippines has yet to realize the egalitarian promise of the online revolution. In the heady days of the 1990s, many believed the Internet would be the great equalizer—providing individuals and nations equal access to information, markets and opportunities. The numbers today tell a different picture.

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