IT Management
CFO, 9/15/04: Coping with Complexity
While hardware and software now cost less, companies pay a big price -- literally and metaphorically -- to hook it all together. Maybe they should rearchitect.
John Verity
While Moore's Law and fierce competition among vendors virtually guarantee that your IT dollar will continuously gain in purchasing power, don't let the good deals blind you to an underlying truth: the complexity of what you're buying may be no bargain at all. In a recent study of more than 20 large enterprises, Boston Consulting Group found that as time went on and these large companies acquired an expanding arsenal of IT, far from gaining economies of scale they were in fact left with "diseconomies of complexity." Think of it as scope creep on a macro level, as a glut of homegrown and packaged software, hardware, network capacity, and sundry other aspects of IT become ever more costly to maintain, impede new projects, and hamstring companies' efforts to respond to changes in the business climate.
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Microsoft
CIO, 9/15/04: Mr. Gates Goes to Washington
Microsoft cared little for politics until the Department of Justice called it a monopoly. Now the company approaches lobbying the way it approaches everything-aggressively-and consequently it dominates the technology policy agenda. CIOs may not be better off for it.
No technology company has better connections than Microsoft.
Over the past five years Microsoft has developed one of the most sophisticated lobbying networks in the country: one that includes dozens of well-connected political insiders at both the state and the federal level, as well as a handful of trade associations that are heavily funded by Microsoft and whose agendas frequently reflect that of the Redmond, Wash.-based company. This network makes it difficult for anyone to pass technology-related legislation Microsoft opposes.
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Security
Infoworld, 9/21/04: Exploit posted for Microsoft JPEG flaw
Customers are urged to install software updates
By Joris Evers, IDG News Service September 21, 2004
Computer code that takes advantage of a flaw in the way many Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp. applications process JPEG images has been published on the Internet and could be a precursor to actual attacks on vulnerable PCs, experts said.
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