Just been reading a rating of the various IT players in terms of revenues size and categories, and its amazing for an industry that prides itself on being dynamic to see how little the vendor statuses have changed from 2005 to 2006. The top 20 players by revenue, ignoring category such as software, hardware or services, saw no new player enter, or any existing player leave. Apple was the only vendor to change position by …

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I am fascinated by the idea of ‘Social Computing’, a new term that is beginning to gain impetus as the idea that using technology to communicate and share information, or collaborate in new ways is in effect a life skill. I confess to an initial irresponsible reaction of ‘I told you so’ to pay back all those people who told me that being interested in computing led to anti social behaviour, but actually my interest …

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I have just had an interesting discussion in a very large global enterprise around standardisation. These guys are good, very good in fact, and have really got control in a way most people in centralised IT would envy, but when it comes to trying to get ‘cross’ the enterprise business requirements to work then they are still finding it hard. The central IT department is surrounded by the operating divisions each of which has its …

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Back in the crazy days of the Internet bubble economy and before blogs had appeared I ‘invented’ the concept of the internet washing machine to illustrate how even every day products may become changed by the Internet. I say I invented, but actually I don’t really know as we couldn’t spread ideas as well in those days and since then both Whirlpool and Zanussi have made partial moves in this direction. I feel that the …

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I have been conscious of the term ‘semantic web’ for quite a few years now, and probably like most people it was all a bit fuzzy, didn’t seem to connect in my mind to anything solid. Well, two events in quick succession made it work for me, the first was hearing Sir Tim Berners-Lee describe it first hand, (WWW2006 conference, Edinburgh), and the second was seeing what advocates of JENA, (JENA Users event, Bristol), are …

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It’s the annual World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh and the place is humming with excitement about a hundred new ideas, capabilities and products. It’s hard not to get excited and I frankly have to confess that my non corporate side has caught the excitement.

When Nicolas Carr posed the question ‘does IT matter’ in the Harvard review some years back it unleashed a hail of comments, mostly from the IT industry, saying the this was not a matter even for debate, of course IT mattered!