Following the invention of the automobile, US car manufacturers dominated the world market for half a century before overseas suppliers challenged their leading position. Today, the majority of software tools and applications originate in the US. The software industry has now reached the half-century mark. Will history repeat itself with offshore developers overtaking this hot market? There are signs that this is a distinct possibility.

Ever since the term computer virus was invented, people have been plumbing the biological world for analogies and ideas to help prevent the spread and seriousness of "human-generated computer viruses." (I put all that in quotes to note that there is nothing necessarily "natural" in computer viruses, they're all manmade and evolve only from a human understanding point of view.

While the Open Source movement conjures up scary scenarios of "free software" for some and Microsoft-bashing for others, moving beyond the heavy rhetoric provides fresh insight into an emerging collaborative development model of software development.

Try this statement on for size:

Many of us have spent the last few weeks watching the twists and turns of the US presidential contest in Florida. Most of us now know more about the election laws of Florida than we know about those of our home state, and each day, it seems, the complexities multiply. Many Americans wonder if it will ever sort itself out.

Many project managers are finding their experiences in deploying e-business applications extremely frustrating. Proof-of-concept evolves rapidly into a pilot project, and before you know it, you are supporting a prototype application in production mode, interacting with back-end transactional systems.

As the number of Web pages grows exponentially, it becomes increasingly important for enterprises to differentiate themselves from the competition. In a world where the competition is just one click away, organizations need strong identities that provide existing and potential customers with the confidence that their needs will be met in the most convenient, reliable way.

There was a good article by Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times (" Retail Battle Returns to the Bricks," http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/20/technology/20ECOMMERCE.html) that discussed how retailers were sleeping more easily these days, now that they no longer worry about being "Amazoned." It's just one of a couple of dozen articles I've been read

We all know about the demand on IT resources and the resulting need to ensure that the projects we work on are business-justified. Yet we continue to commit valuable team resources to projects that have questionable business cases (if they have one at all).

What do "egoless programming" and "pair programming" have in common?

While the rest of technology marketplace has been in the toilet, Microsoft has been chugging along. Maybe not at a record pace, but it's been minting money. Last time I looked, Microsoft had over $40 billion in cash. Pretty good in a really down market.

"That one decision-gradient diagram was the most important piece of the two-day consulting session," said a product development VP client recently.

"It's difficult to speed up development when management takes weeks to make key decisions," laments a Dublin, Ireland, development group whose company executives are in Silicon Valley.

I met with some IT managers recently to discuss concerns over a decision to revamp enterprise-wide business processes and systems. These managers did not make this decision, yet they were responsible for implementing it. They felt that deploying a software package as a way to revamp their business was an ill-conceived strategy and that the project plan was not viable.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has just announced that it's back in the conference business. It will sponsor INTEGRATE 2001. The conference, which aims to attract about 2,500 attendees, will be held in New York City on 19-21 September 2001.

We often experience depression after a success. As IT managers, we can accept these postsuccess blues and deal with them, or we can ignore them and suffer the consequences. We need to plan for success and for the blues that can follow.