Progress Is Our Most Important Product
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the 1960s, when General Electric was still a maker of computers in addition to lots of other gadgetry, the company had a catchy slogan, one perhaps even more famous than IBM's 'Think' admonition from its stern founder, Thomas Watson. That GE slogan--'Progress Is Our Most Important Product'--has become as much of the modern business lexicon as the suggestion that we should think outside of boxes or that team does not have an 'i' in it. READ MORE >

i5/OS V6R1: Raining on the Armadillo Day Parade
by Dan Burger

I would estimate that 99 percent of System i users did not have March 21 circled on their calendars. The release date of i5/OS V6R1 came and went with considerably less fanfare than Armadillo Day (October 18), which is to say there was very little fanfare at all. And that's not to say V6R1 is less exciting than an armadillo. It definitely is more exciting than an armadillo. It's just that in the i5/OS world, the availability of a new operating system does not cause long lines of excited customers eager to get their hands on it. READ MORE >

Oracle's Business Grows in Fiscal Q3, But Not As Much as Expected
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you are the second largest provider of ERP software in the world, the leader in databases, and the contender for the leadership position in middleware, people watch how your business is going, particularly with so much talk about a potential or actual recession in the U.S. economy these days. And so it was as Oracle announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter last Wednesday and gave Wall Street a bit of a disappointment. READ MORE >

As I See It: Misera Plebs Contribuens
by Victor Rozek

Greetings, misera plebs contribuens! It's what the Hungarian people started calling themselves after King Andreas II exempted the nobility from taxation--an immunity which, like one, long, baronial happy meal, lasted from the 13th to the 19th century. It means 'miserable tax-paying people,' and if you've already prepared this year's return, you probably feel like one. READ MORE >