As Microsoft gets ready to release its first customer relationship management (CRM) product, there is a great deal of speculation as to whether or not Microsoft will come to dominate that market.

Any time there are different regions of the world, there may be an opportunity for technology arbitrage. What's common sense in one area of the world may be rocket science in another.

Immediately following September 11, articles began appearing in the computer press saying that in order to prevent further terrorist attacks it was essential to provide the intelligence, law enforcement, customs, immigration, and other US government agencies with better data integration and sharing capabilities.

In November of 2001, IBM launched Eclipse, an open source project that aims at creating a common development-tool framework. IBM donated some $40 million of its software to the new venture. In June of this year, Eclipse released the first version of its open source tool framework. Last week, on 18 September, Eclipse released Version 2 of the framework.

Did you ever wish that you could have an extra three to five hours per week? Hours that you could use to read a new business book, work on your golf swing, or perhaps spend with friends or family. Spending the extra time is never the issue! The question is, how does one find those free hours?

Your business model is the manner in which you charge customers for your products or services -- the way you make money. Every software business model is associated with a license model. A license model is the terms and conditions (or rights and restrictions) that you grant to a user and/or customer of your software as defined by your business model.

Traditional plan-driven project management methods offer (a hope at least) project results to be predictably achieved; that planned costs, schedules, and functionality (scope) can be achieved by careful planning and control measures combined with repeatable processes.