Bill Coleman and the Chairman’s Wife

Before we moved our events to the Javits Center the following year, the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan was our launch pad. It was where we tested our ideas, built momentum, and figured out whether a subject had legs to become a full-scale event. These were essentially our pilot shows—smaller events that often went on to have a few years of life.

One evening, at the end of the first day of one of those events, Roger and I were at the hotel bar having drinks with Bill Coleman—the “B” in BEA Systems. The company’s name came from the first initials of its three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott, and Alfred Chuang. The three executives had started BEA Systems in 1995, and by then their company was one of the most talked-about names in enterprise software.

The opening keynote that day was delivered by Scott Guthrie, the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + AI Group. He led Azure, AI services, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Visual Studio, VS Code, GitHub, .NET, and more. A Microsoft veteran since 1997 and a key architect of .NET and early Azure, he helped drive the company’s cloud dominance under Satya Nadella.

Of course, we published .NET Developer’s Journal for Scott and Microsoft.

Everyone in my company had a clear role during our events. I didn’t. I wasn’t representing the business, and I rarely looked the part of a host. I showed up in my usual casual attire—ripped jeans, worn-out sneakers, and a haircut and shave I’d skipped for a few months. I wasn’t there on official company duty.

Next to Roger, Bill, and me was a group from one of our sponsors, enjoying the end of the first day. They were cheerful and a little loud. One of the men pointed across the bar at Carmen and said, “Check this out—that woman is really hot.”

His colleague quickly interrupted him. “Stop. That’s the chairman’s wife.”

The first guy looked stunned. “No kidding? Is that Jeremy’s wife?”

Jeremy was our conference chair. I had put him in the role, and he delivered it beautifully in his polished Oxford accent. But in casual conversations he had a habit of introducing himself as the company’s chairman.

At one point, Tim O’Reilly, thinking Jeremy was the real deal, flew him to Texas to discuss a partnership. That meeting must have ended faster than any other.

Roger and I had been listening to the whole exchange just inches away. I turned toward the group and said, “She’s not Jeremy’s wife. She’s my wife.”

That turned out to be the biggest joke they’d heard all day. They burst out laughing. One of them walked over to Carmen and asked, “Excuse me, Carmen—who is your husband?”

She pointed across the bar. “That man over there, standing next to Roger.”

The executives from the sponsor company looked genuinely shocked. For the rest of the evening, they went out of their way to show me respect as “Carmen’s husband,” but they still had no idea who I actually was.

By then, Bill, Roger, and I had more than enough drinks. We helped Bill to the elevator, said our goodnights, and headed back to our rooms.

Bill Coleman was a genuinely good man. During the dot-com bubble, his net worth approached a billion dollars. He was also active in philanthropy, particularly in education and youth programs. Through the Coleman Family Foundation, he supported initiatives focused on leadership development, college access, and opportunities for underserved students pursuing careers in technology and business.

Alfred and I didn’t get along, though—Alfred, as in the “A” in BEA Systems. Toward the peak of the dot-com bubble, we practically ruled Silicon Valley. Every software company needed magazine publishers. We were their voice to customers.

I covered both sides of the bloody app server war: IBM and BEA.

I was publishing the BEA WebLogic Developer’s Journal while also publishing the IBM WebSphere Developer’s Journal—both on newsstands worldwide.

Then Alfred made a deal behind our backs, and Jim Fawcette launched a competing title with BEA’s support. Within a few months, we had effectively put both BEA 

Systems and Fawcette Technical Publications out of the game.

The final issue of my WebLogic Developer’s Journal carried the headline: “Is BEA DOA? 

With that issue, we essentially handed the application server narrative to IBM.

In April 2008, Oracle acquired BEA Systems for about $8.5 billion, bringing the company’s influential WebLogic platform into Oracle’s enterprise software stack.

Around the same time, the bank in Washington, D.C., sold Fawcette Technical Publications to 1105 Media.