I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into t...

IBM's announcement last month of the Open AJAX initiative brought to the fore a few key points. The two most obvious are that IBM remains an 800-pound gorilla that the other primates will follow through the business jungle, and that AJAX has emerged as an ironically disruptive technolo...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Many professionals believe the goals of management aren't related to achievement, but on perpetuating one's own position. The management process is a bewildering experience for freshman employees and a cause of anguish to experienced professionals. Common sense says a manager should be...

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.

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...

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...

Each month, as we reach the end of the publication cycle for the print version of WebSphere Journal, a conversation ensues about the nature of this column, 'Final Thoughts.' What should it be, who should write it, should it address daily reality or long-term thinking, how technical sho...