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–“”–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.

This is all particularly ironic to me as I sit here on a cloudy New York Friday afternoon, mulling over IBM’s tactics and strategies for the OS/400 and

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.

The reason I

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.

Most companies would kill to have Oracle’s numbers, but the company’s earnings were lower than expected and its warnings about future growth prospects put

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.

Sucker.

One third and perhaps as many as one half of eligible tax filers either cheat on their returns or don’t file a return at all. And their numbers, like springtime pollen counts, are exploding. In 1985, there were 3.4 million nonfilers. Just two

Novell hosted its annual BrainShare event last week in Salt Lake City, Utah, and probably the key announcement that the company made to the 5,500 attendees at the event and the untold numbers who participated secondarily through the Internet was the preview of some of the features and development plans (in the absence of features) in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 operating system. But don’t hold your breath waiting for SUSE Linux 11, since it is not coming to market any time soon, apparently.

The exact timing for the launch of SUSE Linux 11 is difficult to pin down

On March 21, which was two Fridays ago, IBM began shipping i5/OS V6R1, the latest iteration and a substantially improved version of the venerable family of operating systems for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform. It is a big set of patches.

How big? Well, according to System i PTF Guide editor and IBM System i business partner, Doug Bidwell, chief techie at DLB Associates, the i5/OS V6R1 cumulative patches come on a DVD, and the current crop of patches weighs in at 3.74 GB. “Yep, it’s a biggy,” says Bidwell. “You got to wonder what kind of

While IBM has been pretty tight-lipped about whatever announcement it has in store for the COMMON user group town hall meeting that is slated for April 2, there is some evidence that is coming to me from a different source–and intended to only answer a separate question–that indicates that my hunch that IBM is going to converge the System i and System p brands is probably correct.

One System i shop sent me an email a few weeks ago, asking me when and where the next System i Technical Conference would be held. I made some smart-aleck comment about not

EnterpriseDB, the commercial enterprise that is providing support and services for the open source PostgreSQL relational database management system, announced this week that it has received its third round of venture capital funding, including some dough from IBM.

With Sun Microsystems having completed its $1 billion takeover of MySQL last month, it is a bit easier perhaps for the makers of PostgreSQL to get a little more love and attention from the other platform providers who want to support open source databases. Still, it may seem odd, with IBM having a full line of DB2 databases for mainframes

It may seem intuitively obvious that a shift from personal computers to thin client computers on the desktop should yield a significant savings in energy, but to be sure, you have to really dig into the costs and account for the differences between the two types of clients, but also apportion some energy consumption of the servers that feed the thin clients.

German thin client maker IGEL Technology, like other small end user device makers, wants to use every angle it can to peddle its products, and to that end the company recently put together a comparative study that

If government regulations did not exist, then the software business would have to create them to give itself a market into which to sell products. OK, so maybe the software business doesn’t really work that way, but it sure feels that way. And while no one likes paperwork–even when it is in an electronic format–or the federal, state, or local government snooping into their business, regulations and the need to have and document governance are now a factor of business in the 21st century.

And, as it turns out, it is a big business for software companies, and by extension,