eWEEK EDITORS

Instant messaging vendors are fighting to differentiate their products to avoid seeing them turn into commodities that all look and feel the same. While rivals of America Online have pushed the Federal Communications Commission to require the AIM client to be interoperable with others as part of its merger with Time Warner, the competitors are […]

Venture capitalists have gone from smitten to sorry. The stock market has relegated it to the doghouse. The medias two-year panegyric has transformed into a scolding. Now its Congress turn to take another look at the Internet. From taxation to privacy, intellectual property to telecommunications, the sudden realization that everything with a dot-com after it […]

When historians look back on the current expansion phase of the Internet, they will identify one of its key drivers as the ascendancy of the software developer into the drivers seat. It used to be that the corporate Chief Information Officer, the information technology (IT) manager and other blended business/technology managers held the keys to […]

The ASP Industry Consortium, a group of 700 companies “formed to promote the application service provider industry” recently announced the formation of an End User Council. The group will “provide leadership and direction on how Consortium members can better meet the needs of their customers.” Nobody asked us, but (with tongue in cheek) we propose […]

Electronic messaging systems are the second electronic heartbeat of corporations (information systems being the first). Because any changes to e-mail systems affects the health of the corporate patient, an upgrade should receive the same scrutiny as a potential transplant procedure. With Exchange 2000 (E2K), Microsoft has continued to augment the products messaging, collaboration and Web-based […]

A predicted slowdown in IT spending has set off a mad dash among solutions providers to retool their services offerings, shifting resources away from such areas as Web-site design and into hot growth markets such as managed storage services. Even after the feds surprise interest-rate cut last Wednesday, an unstable economy looms on the horizon. […]

To hear the cable operators tell it, they would like nothing more than to open their high-speed pipelines to competing Internet service providers. Already, the nations two largest cable companies, AT&T and Time Warner, are clearing a technical path for multiple providers with trials in Boulder, Colo., and Columbus, Ohio. Comcast, the third-largest operator, is […]

You hear it in every professional, college and high school locker room in America. Failure is no sin—the only sin is not getting up after youve been knocked down. Expect this mantra to become just as ubiquitous in the New Economy, as more and more young entrepreneurs crash and burn amid the dot-com rubble. Nicholas […]

The World Match Play golf championship began in Australia last week with a lot of familiar names—Els, Lehman, Sutton—and one unfamiliar one, an event sponsor called Accenture. But once a $175 million advertising blitz kicks in, the whole world will realize that Accenture is simply the new moniker for Big Five professional-services stalwart Andersen Consulting. […]

Numerous companies now offer various subscription management services. BMC Software launched a Service Providers Solution unit at Comdex to sell its Patrol line of monitoring and reporting software via MSPs (www.bmc.com/sps). MSP 2ndWave (www.2nd-wave.com) uses Patrol SP services. “Through our subscription services, customers are guaranteed to realize the full [BMC] product potential,” says Bob Seebold, […]

When millions of cable television subscribers begin writing bigger checks for their basic service this year, at least theyll have someone to complain to. One of the factors driving up costs is improving customer service, industry officials claimed. “Its a response to the fact that its a competitive world out there,” said Dave Beckwith, vice […]

Ive been getting his misdirected phone calls and e-mails for years, which is not surprising, since were both New York-area writers who share the same first and last names. While I work full time at Sm@rt Partner, the other Mark Mehler wears multiple professional hats. Hes a lecturer, university teacher and consultant to Fortune 1000 […]