Monday, February 13, 2012
The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
A Tale of Two Stores
Last week was arguably the most significant in the history of e-commerce. In a week in which Kmart, the nation's second largest big-box discount retailer filed for bankruptcy protection, Amazon.com-the poster child of the dot-com generation-declared its first-ever quarterly profit. The profit was small, to be sure, just a penny per share, but its achievement was nevertheless an event that many Internet skeptics, particularly since the dot-com decimation of 2000, thought the world would never see. Go to Story
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Jan 21, 2002
Application Integration: A Primer
EAI, RPC, ORB, SOAP, JMS, CBD, J2EE. The list reads like an alphabet soup of government agencies. In reality, it represents perhaps the most important factor in the future of the Internet and e-business.
Last August, as part of its 14th Annual Critical Issues of Information Systems Study, Computer Science Corporation (CSC) concluded that a great many corporate information systems "remain open to cyberattack" and noted that "many IS managers don't consider security practices and policies to be a top priority in their organizations."
Jan 07, 2002
Life Without the Internet
I had the opportunity, over the holiday season just passed, to travel back in time. Not literally, of course. But the practical effects were very much the same as if I had borrowed the magic DeLorean from "Back to the Future" and set the dial to, say, 1990. This time-traveling was occasioned by the several days that I spent on a remote family farm in Idaho at which Internet service was unavailable, and then by several more in a family member's house packed with, at times, more than a dozen people-and including only one telephone line. For the first time since I had made the same excursion three years before, I had the opportunity to experience life without the Internet. And what an interesting and illuminating experience it was.
Dec 31, 2001
New Year, New Vision
The arrival of the New Year is always a time for reflection. And so, in this most quiet week of the year, I would like to reflect briefly on a question that is surely on the minds of the small band of survivors from the dot-com salad days. Specifically: what makes an Internet company successful?
Dec 24, 2001
A Dot-Com Post-Mortem
Well, Christmas is over for another year. If you're a parent, you no doubt ran the gamut of the annual holiday duties, particularly those involving presents. Like making children's Christmas lists and sending them on to the North Pole. Bundling the kids off to the shopping mall to sit on Santa's knee and whisper their fondest wishes in his ear. Then ordering those last-minute gifts from some of Santa's favorite Internet outlets, like Toys 'R' Us and FAO Schwarz and The Disney Store. If all went well, you were rewarded on Christmas morning by smiles and wide, glowing eyes and shouts of appreciation.
Dec 17, 2001
Making Customer Relationships Work, Part 4
The economy may be in a recession and the NASDAQ in the doldrums, but some segments of the computer software industry seem prepared to prosper. Foremost among them is the customer relationship management (CRM) sector. A new study from Aberdeen Group, the Boston-based research firm, projects that the worldwide market for CRM solutions will resume strong growth in 2002, with revenues expected to increase at an annual rate of nearly 20% over the next five years. “At present, the CRM market is being negatively affected by economic conditions,” conceded report co-author Hugh Bishop upon releasing the forecast. “However, thanks to the clear return on investment and rapidly increasing adoption in overseas markets, the global CRM market will rebound strongly” in the coming months.
Dec 10, 2001
Making Customer Relationships Work, Part 3
There is an old saying, often applied to contract negotiations, that is particularly relevant to the implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) program: "the devil is in the details." Perhaps more than any other corporate IT initiative, CRM programs must be grounded in a large-scale strategic vision that sets forth the effort's corporate purpose, goals, and success metrics. At the same time, however, because CRM programs typically cut across corporate organizational lines and usually involve highly complex business, technical, and database components, the success of any given CRM implementation can depend heavily on the details of how well this multiplicity of interconnecting elements is pieced together.
Dec 3, 2001
Making Customer Relationships Work, Part 2
Of all the classes of e-business initiatives, customer relationship management arguably has won the greatest allegiance among corporate management. As noted in last week’s column, surveys show that one-third of American companies either have a customer relationship management (CRM) program of some sort in place or are planning to implement one within the next 12 months-with spending on CRM services and technology projected to grow from about $40 billion last year to more than $90 billion by 2003. Indeed, one study conducted by Rubin Systems, Inc., for Cap Gemini America identified CRM as the top IT spending priority for fully 81% of responding companies.
Nov 26, 2001
Making Customer Relationships Work, Part 1
You can sense the frustration everywhere. From the scowls in the molasses-paced lines at teller stations to the angry glares at uninformed sales clerks, from the plagues of unanswered consumer emails to the endless telephonic maze of automated customer service systems.
Nov 19, 2001
What's In Store for Stores
With the holidays approaching, the nation's retailers seem as anxious as children for the arrival of Santa this year. Many of them are still reeling from the lackluster holiday shopping season of 2000, and their expectations for the 2001 season-never wildly optimistic-have been frayed to the breaking point by the slumping economy.
Early November brought the news of yet another Internet casualty: the demise of the six-year-old entertainment portal Mr. Showbiz, one of the Walt Disney Company's dwindling portfolio of Internet properties. One of the Web's first major entertainment sites, Mr. Showbiz offered news, commentary, and celebrity profiles-including one of the most comprehensive celebrity databases on the Internet. It was also wildly popular: as recently as this past winter, the market research firm PC Data ranked Mr. Showbiz third in the entertainment news category, just behind the Internet sites of the much more established media companies E! and Entertainment Weekly, with more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month.
Nov 5, 2001
Making Money on the Internet
The Internet is a lot of fun. Even the terminology employed to describe its use-"surfing the Web," for instance-is rooted in leisure. And yet, as a great many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have discovered over the past two years, having fun isn't enough. There is also the troublesome little matter of making money. It's a problem that has been, to put it colloquially, one tough nut to crack.
Nov 2, 2001
How to Build a Bad Web Site
As part of a lengthy research project, I have had the opportunity over the past several weeks to review hundreds of Web sites in a wide variety of categories, ranging from news sites and general information sources to consumer-oriented commerce sites and B2B exchanges. Like any focused exercise, these past weeks have heightened my awareness to certain practices taking place on the Internet, turning what were formerly mere inconveniences into major impediments to completing my work, and in general making me want to rush away from the offending sites as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the research project, I had to spend some time on even the most disagreeable sites, and so that this experience did not go completely to waste, I thought I would compile my findings into a list of recommendations for how to build a really bad Web site in order to give readers of this column a handy list of what steps to take if you want to keep your site free of that pesky Web traffic.
The content venture, launched with great fanfare less than a year earlier, was headed by one of media’s most successful entrepreneurs. It had won the financial backing of an A-List of corporate investors, including CBS, General Electric, Primedia (a leading specialty publisher), and Microsoft. And it had recruited an equally stellar roster of writers and editors, among them former New York magazine editor Clay Felker, playwright Wendy Wasserstein, and celebrated writer George Plimpton.
Oct. 22, 2001
Does Broadband Have a Future?
It is remarked, from ages past, that a picture says a thousand words. Sometimes, personal experience says a lot more.
Oct. 15, 2001
The Coming Software Shakeout
The computer software industry is suffering. It's an observation that would have been obvious to any stock market watcher throughout the first eight and one-half months of the year. But since the terrorist attacks of September 11, the software industry, like so many other sectors of the American economy, has watched bad turn into worse. And the hopes for improvement, once frail at best, now seem weaker than they have been at any point since this long downturn began.
Oct. 1, 2001
Linux Turns 10
End of summer 2001 was a time for technology birthdays. First, in August, came the 20-year anniversary of the personal computer.
Then, in early September, Linux--the open source UNIX-based operating system--reached its 10-year mark. But while the personal computer, despite this year's downturn in sales, has become fully entrenched in both the business and consumer worlds, Linux is still angling to find its footing. Like the pre-adolescent that it is, the operating system is blessed with enormous potential, but nevertheless has a good deal of growing yet to do.
September 24, 2001
The Myths of Web Services
Most adults over age 40 remember the once-ubiquitous phenomenon of S&H Green Stamps. Distributed primarily during the 1960s, the multi-denominational stamps came as a lagniappe with merchandise purchased at thousands of retailers, from gas stations to grocery stores. Consumers collected the green-colored stamps in paper albums and, once the albums were full, could redeem them for a variety of prizes available from a special S&H catalog. For a generation not yet jaded by all manner of advertising gimmickry, S&H Green Stamps were fun to collect and a great way to earn prizes. In reality, they constituted one of the first and most successful customer loyalty programs.
September 3, 2001
Software as a Service
The idea of delivering software applications over the Internet--a notion embodied originally in the application service provider (ASP) concept and, more recently, in the Web services model--is one of the most provocative and enticing on the technological landscape. As Maria Atansanov writes in a recent issue of Ziff Davis' Smart Business, the strategic benefits of using an ASP can seem "irresistible to companies large and small. Why pay software companies every year for the privilege of installing and supporting their applications on an arsenal of PCs when you can hire out, accessing the same programs across the Net?
August 27, 2001
Valuing Customer Loyalty
Phil Wainewright fears that information technology may be stuck in a time warp. As the founder of ASPnews.com, the leading Internet publication devoted exclusively to the application service provider (ASP) market, Wainewright has been a box-seat witness to the birth, meteoric rise, and subsequent death spiral of the ASP model, and now watches with the strained optimism of a sports columnist for a struggling home team as he searches for signs that ASPs are mutating into a new, more viable form.
August 20, 2001
Reflections on an Anniversary
It isn't often that a 20-year-old's birthday garners worldwide media attention. But then the birthday that fell on August 12 was something of a special one, a commemoration of surpassing significance to the business and technology communities alike: the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM personal computer. And, with it, the dawn of the personal computing age.
August 13, 2001
The Customer Revolution
"Fasten your seatbelts! The turbulence you've been experiencing in the stock market isn't over yet. In fact, it's probably going to get worse. Why? Because we're in the midst of a profound revolution. And it's bigger than an Internet revolution or a mobile wireless revolution. It's a customer revolution."
August 06, 2001
Thinking About E-Business
Previous columns in this series have probed a variety of tools and topics associated with e-business. So now perhaps it's time to pose a more basic question: what is this thing called e-business anyway?
July 30, 2001
Making Sense of ASPs
The slowing economy claimed another Internet casualty last week. According to the San Jose Mercury News, San Jose's AristaSoft, a company that sought to pioneer the delivery of business software over the Internet, had been unable to secure additional financing and had begun quietly shutting down.
July 23, 2001
Bandwidth and Behavior
In preparation for the July 18 theatrical release of "Jurassic Park III," cable television's Discovery Channel last week aired a new two-hour dino-documentary entitled "When Dinosaurs Roamed America," followed by a reprise of its Peabody Award winning 2000 production on the same subject, "Walking With Dinosaurs." The shows are a visual spectacle, transporting viewers to the plains and forests of 220 million and 65 million years ago. The audience watches as computer-generated dinosaurs stalk and sprint and struggle with one another, scenes so realistically rendered that it is easy to imagine that one is screening a videotape brought back by a photojournalist of the present day. With the immediacy of a visit to a real-world animal park and the naturalism of Discovery Channel's real-life "Animal Planet," the dinosaur features succeed masterfully in convincing viewers that these mere digital images are, in fact, reality.
July 16, 2001
Food For Thought
One of the great experiments in e-business died last week. Webvan, the long-struggling online grocer, finally bowed to financial reality and closed its doors, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of disappointed customers and investors.
July 9, 2001
The Freedom Train
The Fourth of July holiday just passed is always a good time to reflect on the state of freedom in our world. And in general, for the allies of freedom, the past quarter century has been a good one. With the fall of Communism and the democratization of once totalitarian countries beginning in the 1980s, freedom seems to have been experiencing an upward trajectory, frayed only at the edges, that one can reasonably claim reflects a more or less permanent change in the dynamics of global politics.
July 2, 2001
X Marks the Spot
If you want to know where the Internet may be headed, just ask Michael Crichton. The author and filmmaker presents in his book and film "Disclosure" one of the most vivid examples yet of the potential of digital interaction. In the film version of the story, the lead character, played by Michael Douglas, dons a virtual reality helmet to enter a synthetic world called "The Corridor" that brings sterile data files to life in the form of an ornate, physically realistic library. In The Corridor, rather than scanning through indecipherable file names, as on mundane personal computers, the Douglas character is able to search among familiar virtual representations of file cabinets and documents as if he were physically present among them.
June 25, 2001
Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Environment: Part III
There is a great scene at the end of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" that says more than it should about the state of many corporate Web sites today. By the end of the film, astronaut Dave Bowman, played in brilliantly stunned silence by Kier Dullea, has endured a host of interplanetary horrors. His spaceship has been hijacked by a renegade computer. His partner has died in the suffocating vacuum of space. And he himself has been cast adrift in a tiny space pod, floating toward some undefined but certain doom.
June 18, 2001
Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Environment: Part II
In his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, the late Douglas Adams offers a simple way to avoid getting lost. "Whenever I'm driving and think I may be lost," he says through one of his main characters, "I simply start following the car in front of me. I may never arrive at my original destination, but I often wind up at the most wonderful and unexpected places."
June 11, 2001
Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Environment: Part I
At Circle.com, the Web has come full circle. One look at the company's Web site tells you that it's a little different than your average Yahoo-cloned Web site. Actually, a lot different. There's life in the site's visual imagery. Power. Focus. The messages are simple and clear. You know in an instant what the company does: they design great Web sites. In fact, you don't even need to read the words to understand--the site's visual language tells you what you need to know. Unlike so many Web sites, whose design is no more inspirational than the local phone book, the Circle.com site (and many of its clients' sites) recalls the artful layout, typography, and imagery of an exceptionally well-designed print magazine.
June 4, 2001
Managing Business Processes--Efficiently
During the nearly three centuries that the classical view of atomic physics held sway, matter seemed stable and irreducible. All atoms, physicists claimed, were comprised of three fundamental particles‹protons, neutrons, and electrons‹that represented nature¹s lowest common denominator. Atomic matter could be fused or split into these constituents as one might wish, producing outcomes ranging from molecular novelties to the catastrophe of a nuclear explosion, but humankind could peer no more deeply into the underlying matrix of nature than this.
May 28, 2001
Enhancing the Customer Experience
The lights went out at a Northern California shopping mall a few weeks ago. Facing power shortages brought on in part by unseasonably warm weather, regulators were forced to black out a sizable portion of San Jose, leaving the mall's patrons stranded in an eerie mid-day darkness. With overhead lighting extinguished, department store shoppers found it difficult to navigate through the rows of suddenly indistinguishable merchandise. The lack of power shut down elevators and cash registers alike, stranding the unlucky and ending transactions in mid-stream. Not knowing when the electricity would be restored, droves of customers left their shopping baskets brimming with would-have-been purchases and simply returned home.
It was a commercial debacle that, analysts predict, is likely to be visited upon Californians many times before the summer ends. But businesses need not have a California zip code in order to suffer from frustrated consumers, abandoned shopping carts, and lost sales. It happens on the Internet every day.
May 21, 2001
Streamlining Business Reporting with XBRL
Imagine visiting a crowded outdoor marketplace in some distant, foreign country. You trudge from booth to booth, anxiously seeking buyers for your wares. That's the least of your difficulties. The real challenge lies in the fact that no one speaks your language--nd no one seems to speak the same language. And so, at every booth, you must spend hours trying to interpret would-be buyers' words, and even when you've finished, you're still not sure that you have actually understood one another and that a fair and accurate exchange has been made.
Your days are long, filled with the tedious mechanics of just making verbal connections, and not very productive.
May 14, 2001 Demystifying XML
When the Internet first emerged into the corporate consciousness several years ago, it was initially seen as a novelty, a technological treasure chest, a desktop library that the research-minded might find useful but that was not expected to have any more effect on corporate strategy than a pocket calculator.
That philosophy lasted for, oh, about three seconds.
Like most people of his day, when Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, purchased his first personal computer in 1991, he found it pre-loaded with MS-DOS, Microsoft¹s market-dominant operating system. Like many people, Torvalds was less than satisfied with the operating system's occasional quirkiness and inefficiencies--particularly since he was accustomed to using the university's more powerful and more stable UNIX OS.
April 26, 2001 The Fourth Revolution
Corporate computing is in the midst of its fourth revolution in less than two decades--a revolution whose effects, while perhaps less visible than those of its predecessors, have the potential to be just as profound.
April 20, 2001 Software and The New Internet
The ongoing dot-com implosion, epitomized by the collapse of such one-time Internet poster children as eToys, Pets.com, Garden.com, and Living.com, has called into question the whole premise of the transformative nature of the Internet. And it raises a very pointed question: is the Internet itself on the verge of dying as a tool of commerce?
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