Author Archive: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
Online censorship — in 1985
Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) raised a question over on Facebook about early use of the internet here in the United States. I knew that I had been on the ‘net (for e-mail and USENET purposes) in the early to mid-1980s, and so did some Googling to see if any traces of that still […]
How to retain and improve your IT staff at the same time
In a prior post, I talked about how to help retain your IT staff by aligning their personal goals with those of your IT department and the organization as a whole. Now I want to talk about a simple technique that will not only help you retain your best IT engineers and managers, but will […]
Windows XP end-of-life on April 8, 2014: the debate [UPDATED]
![Windows XP end-of-life on April 8, 2014: the debate [UPDATED]](http://brucefwebster.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Windows_XP_SP3-300x200.png "Windows XP end-of-life on April 8, 2014: the debate [UPDATED]")
[UPDATE AT END OF POST] As I mentioned in my previous post (“Windows Forever and Ever?“), Windows XP still has 33% of the desktop/laptop installed base, even though Microsoft has set its end-of-life (meaning no more security patches) for April 2014 — seven months from now. That 33% actually represents half a billion computers, all […]
“Microsoft Windows Forever and Ever?” (Windows Magazine, June 1996)
[Here’s another article I published back in 1996, this one predicting the problems that Microsoft would face as it continued to advance the Windows operating system. While I didn’t anticipate in this article the rise of post-PC devices, nor the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and subsequent transformation of NeXTstep into OS X, I […]
How to retain IT talent with goal alignment
Back in 1990, I was hired by the principals of a start-up company (Pages Software) to build an engineering team from scratch to create a new product: a design-oriented word processor. For more than a year and a half, I acted both as head of engineering and as chief software architect — a dual role […]