Archives: November 2005

Cyber Monday: The Results

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 30, Categories: e-commerce

I'm kind of surprised how my article on how Cyber Monday isn't all it's cracked up to be has prompted so many folks out there to come down rather hard...

Escape from Password Hell?

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 29, Categories: Enterprise Software

Today, I had to call BW's help desk because I forgot one of the many electronic passwords I need to do my job, and got myself locked out of our...

Of Buying Cell Phones and Lipstick...

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 29, Categories: wireless

If you come into a Sam's Club store in Texas and a cell phone or a PDA you want isn't available, the salesperson will now get the phone FedEx-ed to your home overnight. This is one more step toward turning cell phone buying -- typically, a long and torturous process -- into an enjoyable experience.

Aaaaaaah! It's Santa!

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 29, Categories: e-commerce

I'm completing an online survey for BizRate.com, which I do on occasion to see what issues online retailers deem important. Someone in BizRate's survey creation department must have a...

The Cyber Monday Myth

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 28, Categories: e-commerce

OK, it's not entirely a myth, this notion that a lot of people come back from the Thanksgiving holiday and hop on their company's broadband connection to shop. But after...

Gadgets Dominate Online Holiday Shopping

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 27, Categories: e-commerce

When it comes to holiday shopping online, it looks like electronics rules this year. No wonder, I suppose, with the iPod Nano and the Xbox 360 in the lineup. Still,...

Still Planning to Buy an Apple, But ...

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 27, Categories: Apple Computer

After getting loads of terrific advice from Mac enthusiasts in response to my request on what Apple to buy, I think I've settled on an iBook. Portable, possibly better Wi-Fi...

Mash Up The News

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 25, Categories: Power of Us, Social Media, Web 2.0, mash-ups, tags

Jeff Jarvis notes a very interesting experiment at the Washington Post: Post Remix. If you've got a little technical flair, you can use the Post's RSS feeds to create...

America's response to outsourcing: Automation

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 25, Categories: outsourcing

I had an interesting interview with Paul Horn, the head of IBM Research, when I was working on a story about smart machines that was published in BusinessWeek this week....

Wikizon

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 22, Categories: Amazon.com, Power of Us, Web 2.0, Wiki, Wikipedia

Amazon.com doesn't blab about it much, but it clearly gets the Web 2.0 Power of Us participatory thing. For years, it has had customer book reviews, customer-produced product lists called...

Don't bury the hard drive just yet

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 22, Categories: storage

There's a reason drive-makers such as Seagate and Maxtor sell 500 gigabyte drives, and why they'll soon be selling 800 gigabyte drives.

Prime Time for Amazon Prime

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 22, Categories: Amazon.com, Web, e-commerce

When Amazon.com introduced its Amazon Prime program, where you pay $79 a year for free two-day shipping, some analysts thought it would prove to be a money-loser. Amazon itself said...

AT&T and BellSouth: Cingularly at Odds

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 22, Categories: wireless

USA Today reports that now that SBC has completed its acquisition of AT&T, it will resell Cingular Wireless's service under AT&T brand (remember, Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless a while back)....

Courteous Spammer

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 22, Categories: blogs, spam

Just got a comment from somebody whose mother must be proud, so I have to share it with you. It reads: Three phrases should be among the most common in...

Diggdot.us: A Little Relief for Web Overload

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 21, Categories: Power of Us, RSS, Web, Web 2.0, mash-ups

I've been getting swamped by feed overload for months now. An hour or two out of my day, and while I'm getting a heck of an education, I'm kinda running...

If at First You Don't Succeed, Buy.com Again

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 18, Categories: Amazon.com, IPOs, e-commerce

After failing to keep up with the likes of Amazon.com the first time around, following an IPO just before the Nasdaq bubble burst in early 2000, Buy.com looks like it's...

Tech /business fusion: All talk, little action

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 18, Categories:

The idea of merging business and technology strategy has been all the rage for the past decade, at least--yet, in practice, the two seem to be moving further apart. Chief...

Anything But E-Mail

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 18, Categories: Wiki

BW's Michelle Conlin has the tale of how the European bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein got fed up with e-mail and plunged headlong into new collaboration services such as internal blogs,...

Just When I Thought I Could Ignore the Cisco Merger Rumors...

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 18, Categories: Cisco

Now that [Cisco] has bought one of its old-school rivals, skeptics will wonder if it is falling into the takeover trap

Ganging Up on Google

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 18, Categories: Google

Is it me, or does it seem like Google-bashing is the newest sport? People everywhere seem to be finding lots of shortcomings in the Internet search giant's dealings lately. And...

HP-Compaq Deal Hits Key Targets...Two Years Late

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 17, Categories: Hewlett-Packard

Should today's earnings news be thought of as "Carly's Last Laugh?"

Linux marches on

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 16, Categories: open source software

It's easy to lose track of what's going on with Linux. That's due in part to the almost total lack of marketing hype. The kernel crew, led by Linus Torvalds,...

Google Base Goes Live

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 16, Categories: Google, Web 2.0, eBay

As of tonight, the much-anticipated Google Base is live. Having just landed home from a conference, I haven't had time to try it out, so for now, I'll have to...

Sega's Ambitious Plans

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 15, Categories: games

Sega of America's president and COO Simon Jeffery believes his company might finally start seeing the pay-off of its strategic moves in the last several years this holiday season. Could be. Sega's timing is perfect.

Of Supercomputers, Microsoft and Sheryl Crow

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 15, Categories: high performance computing

Want to know how bad Microsoft wants to reassert its role in the world of supercomputers? Although it just began participating in the 18-year-old SC/05 Supercomputer conference in 2003, Microsoft...

Have You Experienced VoIP's Glaring Glitches?

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 13, Categories: VOIP

When I'd recently tested eight different VoIP services, I was amazed by the number of glitches I encountered. Several services were down -- meaning that users couldn't make or receive...

Nothing Virtual About 100 Grand

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 11, Categories: games

Some guy just spent $100,000 to buy a virtual space station in the online game Project Entropia. I know buying land and other stuff in virtual worlds like Second...

Meet The Web Smart 50

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 10, Categories: Internet, Web, Web 2.0

OK, so Google's great and Flickr's fine and Amazon's amazin'. But check out our new special report, The Web Smart 50, and you'll see that a lot of action...

Dueling Memos

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 10, Categories: software as service

Microsoft has many core competencies, but one that doesn't get much notice is memo writing. In fact, they have some damned effective memo writers. They also have effective memo leakers....

Are Online Reputations Portable?

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 10, Categories: Power of Us, Web 2.0, eBay, reputation

For years, both sellers and buyers on eBay have bellyached about not being able to carry their reputations--the feedback ratings they get from each other on their transactions--to other sites....

Waving the Open Source Banner Isn't Enough

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on November 09, Categories: open source software

Matt Asay has an interesting posting about the Ingres spin out. He posits that a serious foray by Ingres finally gives companies a real, competitive database market again. More interesting...

Surf's Up

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 09, Categories: software

Pat Sueltz has made a study of the tech industry--from the inside. First she spent 20 years at IBM, where she guided CEO Louis Gerstner to the Internet and then...

More Juniper Jujitsu

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 08, Categories: Networking

Juniper clearly knows how to sell networking gear. It's been stuck in high-gear in recent years, winning hefty helpings of market share, not to mention a 90s-style valuation from investors....

The Intel Advantage?

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 08, Categories: Personal Computers

There's remarkable news from the front in the ongoing microprocessor wars. In October, more PCs sold in US retail outlets were equipped with microprocessors from AMD, rather than from Intel,...

Mobile Karaoke, Anyone?

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 08, Categories: wireless

This summer, Grammy Thailand, a mobile carrier, had launched a mobile karaoke application. You can play a song over your phone's speakerphone and sing along. Better yet, you can record...

Yours, Mine & Ours?

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on November 07, Categories: wireless

Interesting announcement today from Good Technology. With companies saying their numero uno priority is maintaining the security of the network and their data as the consider deployments of mobile email...

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 04, Categories: Amazon.com, Power of Us, Web 2.0

Amazon.com is quietly testing another interesting innovation, this time tapping into the Power of Us. The cheeky geeks there call it the Mechanical Turk, after an 18th century hoax, a...

Amazon Ups the Stakes in Online Books

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 03, Categories: Amazon.com, digital media

Amazon.com just announced that it's planning to offer customers the chance to get online access to selected pages for a fee, as well as buy complete digital copies when they...

Best-of-Breed Software Lives!

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 03, Categories: software

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has been the high priest of consolidation in the software industry. His pitch: customers want a few large software makers that offer them a wide...

Today's Good Governance Award Goes To...

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 03, Categories: Hewlett-Packard

...the board of Hewlett-Packard. That's not a sentence I would have forseen myself writing, given some of the nonsense that's gone on in Palo Alto in recent years. But yesterday,...

VoIP: It's Not a Car or a Brand of Vodka

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 03, Categories: VOIP

Clearly, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), allowing for cheap Web calling, is an exciting technology. Except most people don't know about it. Only some 3.25 million Americans will be using...

Speaking of Apple... Some Advice?

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 02, Categories: Apple Computer

I'm finally thinking of making the Switch from a home Windows PC to Apple. And if you don't mind taking a little time, I could use the help of the...

Feed Editors? Um, Yeah, They're Called Magazines

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 02, Categories: RSS, Web 2.0, blogs

Mark Pincus has another take on Fred Wilson's post on the coming attention crisis he sees in countless new RSS feeds and Web services, which I blogged about a few...

Another Apple blog? Yeah!

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 01, Categories: Apple Computer, blogs

Check out BusinessWeek's newest blog: Byte of the Apple. It's written by a team made up of our Mac and 'pod aces Peter Burrows and Arik Hesseldahl and consumer electronics...

How to Save Your Neck in a Four Easy Steps

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on November 01, Categories: linux

Say what you will about Novell CEO Jack Messman-- and believe me, many people are these days-- he's no dummy. Maybe it's for the good of Novell or maybe just...

"Free Oracle! Get Your Free Oracle Here!"

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on November 01, Categories: Enterprise Software

Back in September, when an audience of 10,000 crammed into San Francisco’s Moscone Center to hear what bad boy CEO Larry Ellison had to say, he was at his most...

Intel to AMD: Gimme 65!

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 01, Categories: Chips

On Nov. 1, Intel announced that its Fab 12, using the newest, 65 nm technology, began shipping in high volume. Fab 12 is the world's largest chipmaker's second 65 nm...

Microsoft: 1995 redux?

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 01, Categories: Business History, Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0, software as service

Today's San Francisco briefing by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie bears an eerie resemblance to a fateful day almost exactly a decade ago: Dec. 7, 1995. That was the day...

Pay Attention!

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 01, Categories: Privacy, Web 2.0, attention

... if you have time. Which you probably don't. That's the point of an insightful post by VC Fred Wilson, who fears that an attention crisis is looming. He already...

The New Big Squeeze Facing Dell?

Posted by: Peter Burrows on November 01, Categories: Personal Computers

Soon after I got back to the office yesterday after interviewing executives at Sun Microsystems, Dell Inc. pre-announced bad news for the second quarter in a row. That got me...