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Last Thursday morning, the topic on the Today Show was the MyDoom worm. Matt Lauer, one of the show's two anchors, was interviewing an Internet expert and asked a question near and dear to my own heart: "Is this new virus cyberterrorism?" The expert said no, it was more like cyber vandalism. Clearly, IT experts are seeing a difference that many reporters and I don't see anymore. Even the Terrorism Research Center is now tracking the MyDoom virus...

At this time of year in the United States we have a tradition: It is called Super Bowl Sunday. In this annual tradition, we spend prodigious sums of money to have an extremely large TV installed in our homes, have lots of friends over to watch a bunch of guys run up and down a big lawn, and then fail to actually watch the game because we are too busy eating and talking. It doesn't matter anyway because the two teams playing are generally so mismatched that the outcome is almost always known in the first 15 minutes or so...

Here in the United States, we are in the midst of regularly scheduled insanity where, as part of the process to elect our top government official, the party that opposes the current administration does its best to discredit all of its eligible candidates and then wonders why a sitting president is almost always reelected for another term ...

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas every year is perhaps the most exciting show for the technology enthusiast to attend. There were several high-profile announcements made during the show -- and some were only made to a select number of analysts. Perhaps the biggest public announcement was the partnership between Apple and HP, which will create an HP-branded iPod that will work not only with iTunes, but also with HP's Media Center products based on Microsoft's platform...

As the market starts ramping up for what is likely to be a resurgence in IT spending and a mass attack on the consumer by every technology company on the planet, there will be a few key battles to watch this year. Some will go a long way toward defining the rest of the decade ...

Making a set of New Year's resolutions for myself is certainly helpful but generally not nearly as much fun as making them for others. The year 2003 has been a time of change. It has brought a lot of exciting new experiences for me, and, frankly, I'd like fewer of them in 2004. ...

Through much of the year I hear complaints about personal computers -- whether they are running Windows or the relatively rare alternatives. These complaints are typically about systems reliability, the costs resulting from migrating employees to new hardware, the cost associated with new employees and the massive costs associated with keeping software up to date...

I spent the middle part of last week at Microsoft headquarters. For the first time in a long while, I saw an energy that few firms I've covered or worked for have been able to match. It struck me that most of the folks who disagree with my perspective about Microsoft are thinking of the company the way it was about five years ago, which isn't accurate. A five-year-old viewpoint wouldn't accurately characterize Apple, HP, Dell or SCO either...

Last week was looking relatively uneventful until I got a copy of SCO CEO Darl McBride's "Open Letter" in which he argues that the Linux GPL is unconstitutional. Now, for some of you, you red-lined the letter and spent the next several hours posting your pronounced disagreement with this position to online bulletin boards. I have to admit that my first response to the letter was that McBride's brain had taken a trip and left his body behind. But if you throw out the assumption that McBride has completely lost his mind and read between the letter's lines, another story comes out...

We are a few days from the launch of the new MSN, so it seems appropriate to take a look back at the history of this property to get a better sense of what really didn't happen. Back in 1995, I was working for Dataquest where I made an aggressive prediction about how many users would adopt Windows 95. Using that prediction, Steve Case started screaming bloody murder that Microsoft would put him out of business in short order by instantly signing up tens of millions of customers and easily eclipsing AOL...

I spent several days at Comdex last week. If you were there -- and you work as a systems builder, a parts vendor or an analyst -- Comdex was a great show. If you work as an IT executive, you were probably disappointed because the show set IT expectations that it didn't fulfill. As usual, rumors were flying around that this would be the last Comdex. But with a reported 50 thousand people at the event, it seems a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water...

For his part, industry analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times that InterTrust Technologies' (now co-owned by Sony and Philips) digital rights management (DRM) patents are some of the most important in e-business After all, Enderle noted, DRM remains a critical part of h...

As I write this, I'm getting ready to leave for Comdex, where I'll moderate a panel on the importance of Microssoft's .NET framework. On the panel will be a bunch of folks representing Oracle, Apache and Microsoft ...

While I was at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last month, I finished Merrill R. Chapman's book In Search of Stupidity. In the book, from the perspective of an insider, he lays out the mistakes other companies have made to contribute inadvertently to the dominance of Microsoft. While our views differ as to how significant some blunders were in certain cases, in general Chapman does a good job documenting why many of these companies failed and why Microsoft succeeded...

The mechanical mouse that relies on a trackball will be first to go, according to Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, who said that, in the near future, only the cheapest of computers will still come with a mechanical mouse. The optical mouse and the wireless mouse will become the standard in just 18 months, he predicted.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is a relatively unique event in the industry. Unlike other conferences of its type, this one is largely staffed by Microsoft programmers -- the same kind of people who generally attend these things. People tend to connect better with those who are similar to them, which makes this kind of conference vastly more powerful than those that are staffed by marketing types talking to developers about what the company will do for them in the future (but often having no actual clue about what is really going on at the company)...

Industry analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times that, in essence, Microsoft has decided to use the same sort of collaborative process that the open-source community uses in developing products. He said the company took a good look at how the open-source community operates and then copied those components of the process that made sense in the context of its own business model...

In my column last week -- "Pros, Priests and Zealots: The Three Faces of Linux" -- I divided the folks who have been writing to me about Linux into three groups. The most controversial statement I made in that column was a comment about the last group: I wrote that I was having trouble differentiating between terrorists and the glowing example of humanity I call the Linux Zealot...

Industry analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times that Microsoft's efforts to open its source code do not necessarily represent a shift in the software giant's corporate culture, even though Microsoft has made it clear in internal memos that have been made public that it sees open-source software, such as Linux, as a major competitive threat...

Behaving badly -- by attacking, lying or bullying -- is only bad if someone on the other side does it. Many of the Zealots seem to be unemployed. It is hard to believe that they can stay with any one company for more than a few days by behaving as badly as they do. Were I an IT executive, the apparent fact that these Zealots are walking human-resource disasters would probably keep me up at night. I've watched these people fabricate stories about my own job history and events that I've written about -- as they were happening. These Zealots have been the primary reason that I've come to believe SCO will likely win its lawsuit -- because if the Zealots are lying about facts I know to be true, they must be lying about facts I don't know about. This group owes its roots to similar groups that existed around OS/2 and the Apple platforms. The Zealots are generally seen as being part of the cause when the related platform fails or goes into decline. The Linux Zealots are similar to religious zealots and political extremists. Zealots and Terrorists I have a hard time seeing the Zealots as any different from terrorists because of the nature of their threats. I expect one of them -- or perhaps a group of them -- will go too far at some point and do significant damage to the open-source movement, the ongoing litigation with SCO or their employers. I strongly believe that if September 11th showed us anything, it was that zealots of any movement represent a huge risk to that movement because they do not consider the repercussions of their actions. In the end, I think we are all defined by how we are perceived. Our perception is 100 percent of our reality and doesn't have to have any connection to facts to be real to us. Perhaps more of us -- and I include myself in this comment -- should look underneath our perceptions and challenge their foundations regularly. Whether it is in the Microsoft or open-source software communities, there are people who have good hearts and honest motives. Helping those people to succeed -- while mitigating zealots regardless of where they work or whom they support -- is in the best interest of everyone. Rob Enderle, a TechNewsWorld columnist, is the Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group, a company founded on the concept of providing a unique perspective on personal technology products and trends. ...