Deborah Gage

Twenty years ago, Herb Sorensen had his great flash of insight into how people shop. The researcher of customer behavior sat in his living room leafing through an old Time-Life book, when a picture of cars moving through an intersection caught his attention. The headlight beams crisscrossed in the dark. Those cars could be shoppers, […]

Would you buy all your software over the Internet? IBM thinks you will. As 2002 began, IBM VP and IBM.com General Manager Doug Maine told Baseline that he had an executive mandate to fulfill 100% of IBMs software sales through IBM.com. An IBM spokesman, Michael Rowinski, later would say Maine was referring only to IBMs […]

Rising from the pile of dead dot-coms is a set of new companies trying to fix things that are wrong with the Internet. To what extent they will create new problems remains to be seen, but it is interesting to watch them attack the same problems that their predecessors have attacked again and again—problems that […]

Steve Pieczko got laid off in January. He was working for a security company that was acquired by Ameritech, and middle managers were the first to go. But did he sit around and brood? No. Figuring that there were many people in his position, he launched www.igotlaidoff.com, a site that matches the laid-off with recruiters […]

Sun ONE bears a strong resemblance to SunConnect, a cross-platform framework that Sun developed in the late 1990s to evangelize Java and attack Microsoft in vertical markets such as financial services. Sun partners say Suns commitment to SunConnect was problematic, but Sun ONE has a champion in Anne Thomas Manes, a highly regarded Java analyst […]

Sun Microsystems is recruiting iPlanet head Mark Tolliver to be its Web-services “czar,” as part of a plan to catch up with its rivals on the path to the future of computing. Tolliver, the president of iPlanet, a Sun-America Online joint venture, will oversee Suns efforts to deliver a Web-services platform that can compete with […]

After months of politicking, the peer-to-peer working group is finally getting down to work, although living up to its name will not be easy. Attendance has plummeted since the groups first meeting in October, which attracted more than 300 people, and key companies—including IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems—have so far refused to join. Intel formed […]

Kevin Wiggen and Barry Lind sat out the dot-com boom, but they sure look smart now. While colleagues and even competitors were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture money, Wiggen and Lind passed on the opportunity and bootstrapped their company, Xythos, on credit cards. “We wanted to build a software company, not a […]

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push its .Net strategy through ASPs and is starting to negotiate licensing deals that allow service providers to charge for software on a pay-as-you-go basis, as opposed to a monthly fee. That licensing scheme, which basically charges for software usage the way utilities currently charge for electricity and […]

John Mcintyre, chairman and CEO of Affinity Internet, considers trust to be the toughest stripe to earn in this industry. Earning that recognition from solutions providers, is a challenge he is set on meeting. Affinity Internet is a managed hosting service provider, a new breed of company within the data center and Web hosting arena […]