By Roger Strukhoff  I've never fully embraced the name of this column, 'Final Thoughts.' I get it, this is the last page of the magazine, so is the final word in the literal sense. But the column name sounds like a last will and testament, or less ominously, as if this is all the columnist will ever have ... Feb. 1, 2006 02:15 PM EST Reads: 12,738 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was spending too much money on himself between 2000 and 2002 in the opinion of his accountant, according to court documents that have been released in connection with a challenge to a shareholder lawsuit settlement Ellison made last year. The original story was... Jan. 31, 2006 12:15 PM EST Reads: 17,491 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff  As the year closes it's time for industry columnists to make their bold, wrongheaded predictions for 2006. You won't find that sort of nonsense here. There's no Top 10 or crystal ball or cute list of Things to Watch. Jan. 28, 2006 03:45 PM EST Reads: 13,682 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  It will be interesting over the coming year to witness the progress of open source software in general and open source in application development in particular. IBM, chided by many members of the open source community for taking the proprietary approach to app development (through WebS... Jan. 28, 2006 02:15 PM EST Reads: 13,000 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  So it appears that the power of the pen is omnipotent. In this very space just a couple of months ago, the writer was heard complaining about certain aspects of a college football team, and a few short weeks later the coach of said team lost his job. Wow. Jan. 28, 2006 01:00 PM EST Reads: 16,442 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff  The value of blogging continues to surface as a navel-gazing exercise within the technology community. Does blogging matter? Does anyone care whether or not it matters? Should it matter? These and other meta-questions continue to be posed by those who a.) aren't getting enough hits on ... Jan. 20, 2006 10:45 AM EST Reads: 33,205 |
By Roger Strukhoff A new report from Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network will tout the region as a new center of creativity for the global technology community, citing the Apple iPod as a prime example of this creativity at work. In his recent blogpost, SYS-CON's West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff... Jan. 15, 2006 11:15 PM EST Reads: 9,704 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  This issue has an emphasis on SOA, an area of application development that has gotten a life of its own over the past year. Service-oriented architectures are not only the rage of the age, but represent an approach sure to be on the front burner of enterprise IT managers and developers... Jan. 8, 2006 12:00 PM EST Reads: 13,534 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff Speculation about the announcement of a $200 PC from Google that won't be running Windows is setting technology industry speculation into the highest gear it's seen since, uh, Google's IPO. One analyst has emerged from the pack to make a bubblesque prediction of Google's stock going to... Jan. 5, 2006 01:30 AM EST Reads: 16,501 Replies: 4 |
By Roger Strukhoff Intel is set to revise its fabulously successful 'Intel Inside' campaign, change its logo, and drop the Pentium name in favor of 'Core' as it prepares for the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the short term, and for the 21st century in the long term. Dec. 30, 2005 11:15 AM EST Reads: 14,570 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff It is time for all of punditry to clear its collective throat and pronounce precisely what will happen in the upcoming year. As I child I, somewhere back in the 20th century, learned to make fun of astrologist Jean Dixon's puerile prognostications, even as they dominated the newspaper ... Dec. 29, 2005 11:00 PM EST Reads: 13,260 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Silicon Valley will once again be lauded for its traditional strengths--good educational base, plenty of funding, and a warm-weather location set in a highly competitive society with a relatively low level of government interference, theoretically non-existent class structure, and a cr... Dec. 29, 2005 06:45 PM EST Reads: 9,918 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Random encounters can provide unexpected illumination. If you are the type of person who just starts talking to strangers anywhere anytime, as I am, the conversations that ensue can relate to your work a suprisingly high percentage of the time. Dec. 20, 2005 01:30 PM EST Reads: 13,460 Replies: 3 |
By Roger Strukhoff The value of blogging continues to surface as a naval-gazing exercise within the technology community. Does blogging matter? Does anyone care whether or not it matters? Should it matter? These and other meta-questions continue to be posed by those who a.) aren't getting enough hits on ... Dec. 13, 2005 11:15 AM EST Reads: 9,601 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff A pair of lawsuits has been filed and domain registrars are lined up about the block in opposing a recently proposed extension of ICANN control over domain name extensions. The battle seems destined to last awhile. Dec. 7, 2005 08:15 AM EST Reads: 15,703 Replies: 3 |
By Roger Strukhoff In the wake of its recent, aggressive open-source software strategy announcement, Sun choose its Network Computing event in New York as the scene of releasing a pair of 'Niagara' servers, the SunFire T1000 and T2000, offering the company's 'CoolThreads' multi-threaded computing archite... Dec. 6, 2005 10:00 AM EST Reads: 15,661 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff The ICANN meeting in Vancouver seems to be as lively as such an event can be, with porn in the picture during the most recent proceedings, as well as a continued challenge to its proposal to extend a .com monopoly to VeriSign. Dec. 4, 2005 06:15 PM EST Reads: 9,856 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff  The battles over intellectual property continue. Google is the company-of-the-day in the headlines, with its plan to make available excerpts and whole text from several university libraries under legal attack from the New York-based Author's Guild, which represents 8,000 authors. Nov. 29, 2005 06:00 PM EST Reads: 11,802 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff But 'chaordic?' As Nietzsche wrote, 'out of chaos, comes order.' Or as Mel Brooks wrote, commenting on a character of his pretentiously quoting Nietszche, 'Oh, blow it out your a--, Howard!' My sentiments exactly. Chaordic indeed. Nov. 26, 2005 09:45 PM EST Reads: 18,961 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Adam Jollans is IBM Software Group's senior Linux strategist. He leads its worldwide Linux marketing strategy. In this role he is responsible for defining Linux marketing activities at the software category level and integrating them with both IBM's corporate Linux marketing strategy a... Nov. 19, 2005 05:00 PM EST Reads: 16,821 |
By Roger Strukhoff One characteristic of the boom years of the late 90s was the serial acquisition of companies by Cisco. That stopped when the bubble burst, as the company lost hundreds of billions of market cap and shed thousands of employees. But Cisco has been active recently, and now has announced a... Nov. 18, 2005 04:30 PM EST Reads: 8,973 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff IBM reported a 64% margin of victory over the competition on a new benchmark developed by Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., or SPEC. But when apprised of this claim, BEA executives said 'whoa, just a minute, podner!' So what do these results really mean? Nov. 12, 2005 11:45 PM EST Reads: 31,777 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff The most venerable of databases, Ingres, will see new life as a privately funded, open-source company according to a new arrangement between Computer Associates and a long-time technology investor. Nov. 10, 2005 10:00 PM EST Reads: 9,279 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff The open-source Firefox browser has now been available for a year, and has been downloaded more than 100 million times, according to its developer Mozilla. It has as much as 10 percent of the market, and has emerged as a prime example of open-source success. Now what? Nov. 10, 2005 12:00 PM EST Reads: 20,164 |
By Roger Strukhoff 'So I was sitting under the hot lights at SYS-CON Media's headquarters in Montvale, NJ recently, trying to mind my own business but expecting to get hit with some sort of surprise question by my SYS-CON.TV colleague Jeremy Geelan...' Nov. 6, 2005 08:45 AM EST Reads: 67,743 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  IBM announced an expanded SOA strategy in September building on the recent momentum it has gained over its archrival in this space, BEA, as well as Microsoft's .NET strategy. Nov. 2, 2005 08:45 AM EST Reads: 12,144 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Where technology marketers could at one time predict what was going to happen in Europe today simply by looking at what happened in the U.S. 18 months ago, then add different measures of additional months for other global markets, today they actually have to do some real work to unders... Oct. 27, 2005 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 12,776 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff Intel is going through a classic good news, bad news phase. With record earnings and strong profits, the company is nevertheless perceived to be 'in trouble' with some due to falling market share and earnings that just aren't quite strong enough. Oct. 19, 2005 02:15 PM EDT Reads: 8,841 Replies: 4 |
By Roger Strukhoff SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief recently spent some time in India, talking to developers and writers in several cities about the recent growth of the country's IT outsourcing industry and whether that industry will continue to grow and prosper in coming years. Oct. 16, 2005 11:45 AM EDT Reads: 17,389 Replies: 10 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Unification, integration, clustering, connectivity. These are words found commonly in enterprise IT and in this issue of WebSphere Journal. Picking up on last month's Non-Theme theme, we continue to provide you with a variety of articles that cover many parts of the application develop... Sep. 30, 2005 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,616 |
By Roger Strukhoff It's not too early to start speculating about the 2008 presidential race in the U.S. So perhaps it's not too early to start speculating about the ultimate fate of Baidu.com, the Chinese search-engine company that made a spectacular IPO debut recently. Aug. 24, 2005 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 9,052 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  A few months back I used to this column to cogitate about the nature of a sphere. I subsequently compared that type of thinking to the wrongheaded 'the world is flat' new paradigm that is going around the world (so to speak) because of a new book with that offensive phrase as its title... Aug. 17, 2005 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 14,416 |
By Roger Strukhoff  The idea of a 'pure' application development continues to lose meaning in an enterprise IT world that continues to try to integrate legacy systems with server networks, local-area networks, increasing varieties of wireless networks and devices, and the latest new kids on the block who ... Aug. 17, 2005 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 12,926 |
By Roger Strukhoff Is Google responsible for the information that its technology uncovers? Should it be working on ways to protect individual privacy? Maybe not, but the company certainly did not like getting hoisted by its own cyberpetard. Aug. 14, 2005 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 11,440 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff Is there a new round of tulip mania in the high technology markets? The Sunday Essay examines the implications of Baidu.com and its spectacular first day as a public company. Aug. 7, 2005 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 11,268 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff Well past the time when it's been determined that the AOL/Time Warner combination maybe wasn't such a good idea after all, Time Warner may be biting its final bullet in paying out $2.4 billion to settle litigation regarding overstatement of revenue in the wake of the merger. Aug. 3, 2005 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 10,102 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff More than $7 trillion was lost in the tech crash a few years back. Now that the industry is becoming healthy again, is it also returning to a very bad habit of the dot-com bubble era? Jul. 31, 2005 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 9,121 Replies: 1 |
By Roger Strukhoff  Revenues and earnings have been generaly strong, even spectacular, in the most recent quarters for technology companies. With interest rates remaining low, technology purchased in the late 90s bubble at or past the end of its replacement cycle, and innovation continuing to march forwar... Jul. 31, 2005 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 11,414 Replies: 2 |
By Roger Strukhoff  This month marks the 10th Anniversary of the JavaOne conference, sponsored and controlled by Sun Microsystems, and an annual drawing card for Java developers worldwide. As someone who played in a role in this event?s launch, I am always happy to see it succeed, to see Java and its offs... Jul. 29, 2005 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 12,769 |
By Roger Strukhoff  New HP CEO Mark Hurd announced a reduction in HP's employment of 10 percent, to be accomplished over the next 18 months, and mostly targeted administrative departments. He also eliminated the company's Customer Solutions Group, in a continued effort to restore a semblance of the compan... Jul. 19, 2005 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 10,353 Replies: 1 |
Roger Strukhoff earned a BA with honors from Knox College, a Certificate in Technical Communications from UC-Berkeley, and an MBA from CSU-East Bay. His work recently won a "Stevie" American Business Award as best publication in its category. His volunteer work in international affairs merited a Letter of Commendation from the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. He splits most of his time between Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia, but can also be found at 
