Trailblazers

Last week I was asked to comment on a study of CEOs. It found that young ones do better than old ones do, which kind of pissed me off. At the same time, like a lot of folks in my business, I've been looking back at the lessons learned from Steve Jobs, who is kind of the CEO gold standard, and compa...

Google's Nexus One phone is a winner, according to Linus Torvalds, founder of the operating system it's based on. "I generally hate phones," explained Torvalds, who is known as "the father of Linux," in a blog post on Saturday. "At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, ...

Move over Data.gov. The United Kingdom has unveiled its own version of an open source database for its citizens, and the U.S. version pales in comparison. The site, data.gov.uk, which has been running in beta since last September, opened to the public this week to much fanfare. The brainchild of Web...

From a technology perspective, this decade -- with Apple and Google being exceptions -- sucked. There were some interesting things that happened that set us up for the teen decade, though, and that fuel anticipation for the 20s, which a hundred years ago, was actually a decade of wonder and exciteme...

The age of the computer started in the 1950s, and one of the first things that happened to a then relatively tiny IBM was it got nailed by the Department of Justice. The result was competition and the modern age of computing. Last week, the DoJ opened another, very similar, investigation of IBM. It ...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can be a wellspring of newsworthy comments. Little wonder, then, that for close to an hour on Tuesday, IT journalists were rapt as he ruminated on the subjects of the day in an interview with Sun Microsystems' Ed Zander at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Ellison didn't...

In the United States, the 4th of July is celebrated as Independence Day, recalling the time when Americans stepped away from a government they viewed as repressive and forged a new future. Over the years, I've worked for a number of harsh managers and companies. Some were actually good for me -- ot...

When ubExact.com's CEO Wilhelmina Stephenson started work on her innovative beta platform last year for a new search engine concept, she had every reason to believe consumers would gravitate to the new search technology designed around the way they searched the Internet. However, what she did not co...

What started out on Sept. 2, 2008, as a potential innovation in the search engine space ended this month as the latest technology sacrifice to the economic gods. ubExact.com went out of business, unable to sustain enough financial traction to make the innovation viable. ubExact spent much of its bet...

Struggling Internet portal Yahoo has tapped former AutoDesk CEO Carol Bartz as its new CEO. Bartz, 60, will face a monumental task in attempting to turn around Yahoo, which was the No. 1 destination on the Internet before being supplanted by search engine powerhouse Google a few years ago. Bartz bri...