A few years ago, a British newspaper speculated on what might be the Web equivalent of the Seven Wonders of the World, and received suggestions that were hardly surprising: Google search, the Amazon.com e-tail portal, the eBay auction mechanism, etc. But that was back in 1991, before F...

Coach Wei, whose Java credentials are impeccable, opened up a can of worms by raising the issue of why Java's not in favor any more for building web sites, even complex ones. Even a complex site like Facebook, Wei noted, is not written in Java. 'Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to...

Gartner says that the total number of bloggers will peak during the first half of this year at around 100 million, causing John R. Patrick to ask rhetorically whether spring 2007 truly is The Peak of Blogging?

These are curious times just now for Java. In one and the same month, Steve Jobs stands up, and declares - referring to language support on the new Apple iPhone - 'Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain.' And in the same month a...

The year 2006 in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto Internet video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussei...

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10...

In one of my (several) former professional lives, I used to publish books about the future, including, for example, the world's first full-length book about groupware. Unless we can first capture and thereafter harvest - asynchronously, as and when it is most needed and most relevant -...

Ever since Google realized that 12% of the population would consult Google prior to seeing a doctor, which was followed by a British Medical Journal editorial suggesting that one of the natural next steps for Google would be some kind of medical database for personal use, rumors have b...

When Nicholas Carr posed the question 'Does IT Matter?' in his now-famous Harvard Business Review essay, he clearly knew that it would provoke discussion. He probably didn't know, on the other hand, that it would eventually cause the world's richest man - whose wealth is derived 100% f...

Almost anyone who writes about Internet technologies, or i-Technology in shorthand, runs into a problem area from time to time concerning the issue of what in the i-Technology world was invented by whom?

Every year for the past 10 years, SYS-CON Media's 'Readers' Choice Awards' have given the multiple constituencies we serve - developers, architects, IT managers, vendors - a chance to exercise their democratic rights, not just through the ballot box but also through the nomination proc...

This is traditionally the time of year for SYS-CON Media's roundup of i-Technology predictions from around the Web and the year's harvest of thoughts and viewpoints. According to our worldwide network of software development activists, evangelists, and executives, 2006 promises to be a...

'Please don't read [anything] in to my not being at Sun's recent announcement with Oracle,' wrote Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz the weekend after Sun (represented not by Jonathan but by Scott McNealy) and Oracle (represented by Larry Ellison) announced a broad-based reinvig...

Sometimes people ask me what it takes to run a successful business and I, who know only the media business, am always hesitant to reply. What could someone who has 'merely' spent the past 25 years exclusively in publishing and broadcasting via radio, TV, print and, most recently, onlin...

If successful trade expos are a good barometer of the market place (and they are), then things are going very well indeed with the homegrown category of apps named by Macromedia (soon to become Adobe), namely 'RIAs.' Which started me thinking: to what extent are the winners in the game...

Sun and Google are going to be teaming up to take on Microsoft in its holiest of holy markets, the desktop. Could such an alliance have been dreamed of just one year ago? The answer, of course, is 'Yes!' 'Game-changing' is what a disruptive company like Google does best, and Sun for it...

September is here and since the name comes from the Latin septem, for 'seven' - September having been until 153 BCE not the ninth but the seventh month of the Roman calendar - I have no hesitation in saying that it's an appropriate month to pluck just seven items from the wealth of inf...

All the myriad commentators who monitor Internet technologies and the i-Technology companies on the NASDAQ doubtless have their own private cluster of indicators that they use to take a weather-check on the overall state of the industry. For some, it's as simple as looking at the NASDA...

Who do you suppose registered their corporate Internet domain name first: Microsoft, Oracle, or Sun? The answer is Sun; it did so in 1986. When in the early 1980s Dr. David Mills, John Postel, Zaw-Sing Su, and Dr. Paul Mockapetris were all involved in the development of the Domain Name...

Technology birthdays come and go, but Internet technologies, by their very nature, aren't old enough to allow yet for centenaries, or even diamond anniversaries. So it is fascinating to see how people are reacting to the fact that popular technologies like Java, ColdFusion, and Flash h...

When we opened up the JDJ domain to bloggers everywhere, we knew the take-up would be good. But one thing we couldn't be certain about in advance was whether the blogs themselves would be any good. We needn't have worried. As many of you will already have found out, the editors of JDJ ...

As Sun open-sources Solaris, and another software development 'community' is tugged into being around it, critics are saying - Red Hat's general counsel Mark Webbink in particular - that the strategy will fail.

Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final 'cut' to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to twent...

When I asked in a previous editorial who the Top Twenty Software People in the World were, I knew there would be a widely divergent response from readers. As promised, here's a preliminary update on the identity of some of your nominees.

Hurricanes Ivan, Charley, and Frances notwithstanding, sometimes being in the eye of the storm has its advantages. At SYS-CON Media, where we by definition dwell at the epicenter of what might be called the i-technology weather cycle, our central position allows us to ask industry infl...

What do a CNET technology columnist, 95.5 million telephone handsets, and Sun's president and COO all have in common? Answer: they all strongly favor Java. Is it a sign of better times ahead for the language once known as 'Oak'?