Joshua Greenbaum

Lawsuits between competing software vendors are relatively rare, and the public disclosure of what really happened is even rarer still. It’s not just that no one likes bad publicity, it’s that there’s one major problem with proving who harmed whom in cases that involve such issues as misappropriation of trade secrets. The only way to […]

Massive confusion has hit the enterprise applications market, and before the dust settles there stand to be a good number of losers and only a few lucky winners. But one class of software company may end up benefiting more than anyone ever imagined: start-ups and the smaller, more nimble companies we used to call “best […]

This year’s award for the most obvious marketing campaign goes to PeopleSoft for its new Total Ownership Experience (TOE) initiative. If it weren’t for the fact that the problems PeopleSoft wants to address — complexity in the implementation and use of enterprise software — are so endemic to the industry, I’d be tempted to suggest […]

Does Europe know something we don’t know about Web services? At a recent CIO summit I attended in Spain, 50-odd CIOs from Europe’s top companies surprised everyone, including themselves, with acknowledgement that, by a margin of two to one, their companies were actively developing Web services-based applications. The irony of this overwhelming support is that […]

Another data point in the build versus buy debate came to light recently with the announcement that Kaiser Permanente, the country’s largest HMO, would be scrapping a multi-year, $400 million-plus custom development effort to create a patient record system in favor of a packaged solution. The custom effort was led by IBM, and resulted in […]

One of the great migrations of the software industry is about the begin anew. It’s the migration of Oracle’s time and energy back into a key market that the company hasn’t paid much attention to of late. The migration occurs on a relatively regular basis, which is either a criticism that implies a lack of […]

SAP’s announcement of its NetWeaver technology platform heralds an important shift in the enterprise applications market that will have an impact not just on SAP but its competitors and some key partners as well. The shift is in the details of a complex announcement that is almost too grandiose. But don’t be fooled by the […]

First CrossWorlds, then PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, then Rational. To heck with that silly ubiquitous computing idea and those funky, retro ads — the really retro part of IBM is found in these three acquisitions. Connectivity, consulting, tools: just add big iron and its 1992 all over again. What the $2.1 billion bid for Rational tells us, […]

What all the federal and state prosecutors will never get is Microsoft’s ability to turn a competitor’s strategic innovation into a low-priced, high-volume commodity that Microsoft can then sell with a retail tag that no one else can match. What’s so brilliant about this capability is that it is both very legal and very advantageous […]

Siebel Systems’ assertions that it enjoys an unprecedented 90-plus percent customer satisfaction rating came under fire recently in a report from Nucleus Research that questioned not just Siebel’s customer satisfaction rating but its return on investment claims. Within a week, Siebel released its most recent customer satisfaction survey (conducted by Satmetrix, a research firm in […]