Deborah Gage

None of us in the media has been totally successful at predicting which startups will succeed, especially recently during the reign of the dot-coms. But this is the first time Ive received an apology from a company I wrote about that failed. Tom Robinson was the CEO of Gizmo.com, an online exchange for the disposal […]

Jan Brady hated it. AL Gore hated it. And now Sun Microsystems is tired of playing second fiddle. Thats why Sun has unveiled a new peer-to-peer and B2B endeavor to counter Microsoft. Following Microsofts HailStorm initiative, Sun last week posted source code and specifications for JXTA, its peer-to-peer foundational technology. Sun is getting help from […]

Instead of summoning Silicon Valley partners to Redmond, Microsoft is now greeting them in their own backyard. Few people noticed when the company opened the Microsoft Technology Center in Mountain View, Calif., last month, but it was a critical event for the software giant. During the opening ceremony, local politicians and the press were invited […]

If stress were his major, Jim Allchin would have graduated magna cum laude. The VP of Microsofts Platforms Group was a key player in the rise of Windows NT, and he personally oversaw the final shipment of Windows 2000. And if those activities didnt create enough strain on his psyche, the 49-year-old Allchin was brutally […]

Clueless is a word thrown around the industry a lot these days, and its been applied to us for our March 26 cover story, “Internet Armageddon”. “Spare us from such clueless writers,” wrote one reader in response to the story. This piece on the vulnerabilities of the Internets infrastructure struck some readers as fear-mongering, and […]

I have known Brian Croll and Tom Goguen for years—since the days when they were on the Solaris team at Sun Microsystems and I was a cub reporter who barely knew what Unix was. We followed Suns dysfunctional relationship with Intel together and debated Suns ever-shifting positions on open-source software. They were smart and loved […]

For several years, Judy Estrin has been an outspoken critic of what she calls the “Band-Aid” approach to strengthening the infrastructure of the Internet. The former Cisco CTO and her husband, Bill Carrico, also from Cisco, launched PacketDesign last June as their latest contribution to making the Internet work better. The company has raised $24 […]

Hewlett-Packard has passed on to its employees a fan letter from the chairman and CEO of OfficeMax in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Michael Feuer writes that he was the first person ever pulled from a car by the Chester Township Fire Rescue Department, while operating a PC—an HP Jornada Pocket PC. Feuer also may be the […]

The future of every business is, or will be, tied to the Internet in one way or another. Its the best medium for nearly instant and universal communication that the world has ever known, and its an essential means of connecting businesses to their suppliers, their customers and to the world at large. But underneath […]

Is the Internet at risk? Not according to Fritz Mueller, senior director of product marketing of Keynote, an Internet performance monitoring firm. Mueller uses this analogy: “If you take out an automated teller machine [ATM], does this mean that the entire banking system is gone? No, it just means that the people who want to […]

The Nasdaq continues to slide, and the mood at last weeks Network Outlook conference was somber. VCs and investment bankers clustered anxiously around CNBC to watch the numbers drop, while concurring that the downturn is the most severe in 10 years. So what are those companies that are still getting funded doing (or not doing)? […]

At the end of my last column, I promised Id tell you why iRobot—a company co-founded by two MIT grads and an MIT professor—gave its remote-controlled robot human characteristics. One premise of the column was that the Internet does not change human behavior, and I thought about that as I watched iRobots co-founders show off […]