Intel Dispels the Megahertz Myth
In the early days of PC chip manufacture, speed was the name of the game. All you had to do was crank up the clock cycles and watch performance-hungry customers come running. But as the new century dawned and clock speeds soared into the gigahertz, old chip designs couldn't keep up. They ran too hot and consumed too much power. Enter the Pentium M, a radical new chip pioneered by a team at Intel's Haifa, Israel, labs, led by Mooly Eden.

Though the Pentium M was intended for mobile PCs, with lower power consumption and more efficient instruction pipelines than contemporary CPUs, it became clear that Intel was onto a breakthrough, even for desktops.

Soon the die was cast. Today, Intel's leading Core series of chips, launched in 2006, are derived from the Pentium M, while the company's earlier architecture is due to be retired later this year. From now on, the chips that win the race will have to be not just faster, but smarter.

NetWare Falls to the Net
Before Novell NetWare debuted in 1985, transferring files in the typical office meant handing off a floppy disk. NetWare's affordable PC networking quickly took the computing world by storm; by the late 1980s, Novell claimed a 90 percent share of the market.

But Novell never foresaw NetWare's Achilles' heel. If Microsoft was famously slow to embrace the Internet, the same goes double for Novell.

By most standards, Windows NT was clunky compared to NetWare, but it had one clear advantage: native support for TCP/IP, the core protocol of the Internet. NetWare servers relied on the older protocols IPX and SPX, which made it harder to integrate NetWare servers with FTP clients, browsers, and Internet e-mail. As demand for the Internet soared, businesses began replacing their NetWare servers with Windows, and NetWare networks were soon headed the way of the floppy disk.

Running a large IT shop was never easy, but at least you didn't have the government breathing down your neck. That changed in 2002, however, with the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Enron, WorldCom, and other corporate accounting scandals exposed the need for greater accountability on the part of publicly traded companies. But accountability means auditing, and to audit you need records. Unfortunately, the burden of recordkeeping required by Sarbanes-Oxley fell to IT.

By 2005, IT managers found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time and money on SOX compliance. Vague rules and unproven technologies left many guessing. And if SOX wasn't bad enough, healthcare companies had the added burden of HIPAA to worry about.