New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella certainly has his work cut out for him, but his job pales in comparison to the mess Steve Ballmer inherited in 2000. Nadella should succeed -- and if he does, he owes a lot to his oft-maligned predecessor.
Recently I saw yet another slide presentation showcasing the decline of enterprise IT spending and the comparable increase in public cloud business. The conclusion? Enterprises just don't have money to spend and it's killing enterprise vendors.
Oracle was in the news for the wrong reason this week when a former employee filed a lawsuit alleging the firm is racist. The incident provides some lessons in image and reputation management in our age of social media and 24-hour news cycles. As it turns out, IT departments can help protect the brand.
Dell is going private, and that means Michael Dell can stop worrying about shareholders and start focusing on what it will take to make his company grow.
Robots, 3-D printers and wearable tech are indeed cool, but they should raise red flags for IT leaders. Here's how these emerging technologies will cause operations, privacy and user policy headaches for CIOs in 2014.
Google's soon-to-be-publicly-available wearable technology exposes your company to problems ranging from illegal wiretapping and surveillance to a wild spectrum of inappropriate uses. Columnist Rob Enderle writes that you should do yourself a favor and ban Google Glass before it is even available to your employees.
As times change, so does the role of IT. A generation ago, it had to embrace PCs and client/server solutions. Now IT departments are faced with the consumerization of technology. Could the same analytics that helps companies predict customer behavior help IT departments stay relevant?
The vendor chosen in a no-bid process to build Healthcare.gov was fired from a similar project after missing deadlines and suffering security lapses for three years. Such obvious mistakes are unfortunately all too common in the private and public sector. Here are four simple ways to make sure you choose the right vendor for your IT project.
CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle isn't suggesting that Amazon get into gaming. Rather, AWS needs to approach IBM and the enterprise cloud the same way Microsoft successfully took on Sony. Otherwise, Amazon risks entering the annals of tech history alongside Lisa, Vaio and Zune.
IBM will eventually beat Amazon Web Services, writes CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle, but not because AWS has an inferior product. In many ways, AWS is better than IBM's cloud offering. But Big Blue's experience with enterprise customers, not to mention the federal government, shows that great businesses processes often beat great products.
CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle suffered a brutal beating after police broke up an illegal rave next door to his house. The rave attracted hundreds of teens who saw the party invite on Facebook. The incident left Enderle to wonder why social sites and governments are reluctant to use their data to prevent bad things from happening.
BlackBerry, BMC and Dell are three of the latest tech companies to go private after a series of stumbles as public companies. To succeed in the latest chapter of their business lives, these firms need to undo the damage done by going public in the first place. It's easier said than done.
When I was at IBM, I spent some time in the Executive Resource program, which is designed specifically to prepare someone to be a CEO. The program includes classes by top executives and military officers who either were CEOs themselves or were on the short path to becoming a CEO.
Outside the Executive Resource program, I've also met or studied a number of CEOs, including Thomas Watson Jr., Steve Jobs, Louis Gerstner, Bill Gates and a variety of others. Each had unique skills, and no one was perfect in all things-though Watson came closest. Some were founders, some the sons of founders and some hired to fix broken companies, but each stood out in succeeding where peers in the same period failed.
For several years I've been talking to big data companies trying to sell products and to IT executives trying to get their hands around the issues. Some interesting problems persist. It's clear we're still at the beginning of understanding this problem, and we're likely still a long way from understanding the promise of using this information.
Over the years, I've worked through a number of turnarounds, mergers, acquisitions and startups. I consistently rode them out under the assumption that each provides unique opportunities for advancement and personal growth that you likely can't get anyplace else.
Looking back, though, there were a number of times when leaving would have both been less stressful and better for my career. Frankly, I think I was just afraid of going on a job hunt again and used the "advancement and personal growth" excuse to overshadow being afraid to make the wrong new job choice or end up unemployed.