HP as a bloody bumbling James Bond

The news beat: The tech sector survived, albeit barely in some cases, more than its fair share of embarrassing gaffes this past year. In the top 10 news stories of 2006, Marc Ferranti of the IDG News Service includes some of those. AOL's massive search data breach, exploding batteries and, of course, Hewlett-Packard's board trying, and failing in a bitter, ugly fashion, to become the new corporate 007. It's not all blushing faces, though.

Columnists' corner: Pretty much everything in life has what the oil industry refers to as an upstream and downstream -- and IT is no exception. "But tracking things accurately starting far upstream may be one of the more daunting challenges facing IT during the next decade," explains David Margulius in this week's installment of From the Analysts. "Alas, there is hope. IT is reaching its tentacles further and further upstream, and downstream, shining light where there was once darkness and ignorance."

Podcast: For his Friday podcast Jon Udell has a conversation with ... Jon Udell. Neither an impostor, a body double, a schizophrenic, nor another man of the same name. In this self-reliant interview Mr. Udell puts himself through a series of questions that reveal why he is taking a job at Microsoft, and what he hopes to accomplish there. "I'll continue to be a channel for alpha geeks," he writes. "But I also want to become a channel for a whole lot of civilians in the mainstream. And above all, I want to build bridges between these two groups."


Posted by Tom Sullivan