eWEEK EDITORS

Managed service providers focused on the enterprise from the start are feeling confident as they watch their cohorts run through a quick and painful dot-com-to-enterprise-customer conversion. The time and money spent three years ago learning to help large companies run complex back-office applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) gives them plenty of lead to […]

Economic downturns and even recessions have their virtues. They give businesses the chance to ask what value they are delivering to customers and what return they are earning on their own investments—including IT. This years Labor Day occurs at what may be the low point of the current economic doldrums. Right now, there is plenty […]

After his AT&T fiasco, to where can CEO Mike Armstrong possibly fail upward? Perhaps the U.S. Congress, where wavering and flip-flopping are prerequisites for success. We can only wonder why AT&Ts board has not shown Armstrong the golden door. No matter. We offer him instead the Raspberry Throne — a dubious perch whence he can […]

Amazon Wades In Amazon.com is heading into murky retail waters, announcing late last week that it will start selling PCs online. The announcement came the same day the Department of Commerce said that online purchases had dropped 1.8 percent to $7.46 billion in the second quarter, after slipping 14.5 percent in the first quarter. Holding […]

To best understand how bumbling bureaucracies are born, you need look no farther than the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, that band of merry pranksters who administer top-level domains. Decisions made in a vacuum, zero oversight, a tin ear to constituents and a blithe disregard for its own public image — its all […]

Despite the high volume of the battle between lawmakers and lobbyists about the degree to which the regional Bell companies should be regulated, theres a strong chance that, in the end, the skirmish on Capitol Hill will be called a draw. Yet, there are bits and pieces of telecommunications policy that are still working their […]

The battle over broadband is about to begin in earnest. With a virtual stalemate on Capitol Hill, a group of high-tech CEOs will converge on Washington to try to move the front line from Congress to the Federal Communications Commission. At issue are battling sectors of the telecom industry that are traditionally regulated in very […]

3Coms Audrey never even made it to wallflower status — she left before the ball was over. Audrey was an adorable but badly handicapped Internet appliance. Introduced in October 2000, the product was guillotined in March when 3Com abruptly shut down its Internet appliance division amid other cost-cutting actions. The sweet-looking box was a dreadful […]

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair! Like the shattered remains of Ozymandias empire, the remnants of Internet companies past still litter our civilization. And no, Im not talking about eBay auctions. Before Kozmo.com folded in April, it had distributed hundreds of metal drop-boxes for customers to return their video rentals at Starbucks and […]

In its day, the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalog represented one of the most advanced retailing tools ever conceived. Through the phonebook-size publication, residents of rural America could order everything from cowboy hats to prefabricated houses, while expecting fair prices and reliable delivery. Sears still publishes catalogs today, but the cutting edge is Sears.com, a […]

A new alliance of telecom carriers, movie studios and manufacturers plans to use video-on-demand to cut a broadband swath to the front door of the consumer willing to spend freely on entertainment. The question for some industry rivals: Who gets mowed down in the process? Among the most threatened are cable operators and video rental […]

I wrote a few weeks ago about the guy in Connecticut who was fined by a car rental place that had tracked his speeds using global positioning satellites — I was appalled, and figured that everyone who read the column would be, too. But I was wrong. Acme Rent-a-Car in New Haven automatically debited the […]