Deborah Gage

Manufacturing cars without knowing whether customers will want to buy them does not seem like a formula for business success. But that was the situation at American Honda in Torrance, Calif., and in the rest of the auto industry in the mid-1990s. Hondas plants produced “pretty much what they wanted,” says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, […]

In my last column, I promised to tell you about Yuval Davidor, the scholar and computer scientist whose algorithms solve intractable problems. Davidors company, Schema, is helping wireless carriers maximize the use of their networks, but thats just its latest incarnation. Davidor founded Schema in 1994. Its focus on wireless—which began in 1998—is potentially lucrative, […]

Model N, the B2B software company led by industry veteran Zack Rinat, came out of stealth mode last week after a nine-month delay. Model Ns software allows companies to establish a private network with customers and partners so that business processes like order management and contract management can be automated. Competitors include Ariba, which acquired […]

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 […]

Office workers in San Francisco have another reason to stay alert. Consumer groups are protesting against PG&E, Californias largest provider of electricity, and that has made other companies nervous. Consumers took a dim view of PG&Es recent bankruptcy filing, figuring the utility will use it as an excuse to raise rates. And Bechtel, which is […]

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 […]