Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Symantec made “one enormous mistake” in its pursuit of storage software supplier Veritas, according to statements Symantec CEO John Thompson made on Monday, in his first public comments since the merger of the two market leaders was completed Friday. “We didn’t say why,” Thompson said in an interactive discussion Monday morning with about 80 CIOs […]

Home Depot wants to put more information at the fingertips of its “orange-blooded associates doing hand-to-hand combat in the aisles,” its chief information officer said Wednesday. The home improvement retailer, fresh off spending $1 billion in the last three years on self-checkout aisles and other store systems, wants to give its associates “real-time access” to […]

Gary KellySouthwest Airlines JET JOCKEYTITLE: Vice chairman of the board and CEOTENURE: 8 months on current job; 19 years at companyEDUCATION: B.B.A. in accounting from the University of Texas at Austin; Certified Public Accountant.CHALLENGE: Be profitable, while remaining the lowest-cost passenger airline in North America Southwest Airlines is the only U.S. carrier to be profitable […]

When Steve Jobs held a mini Mac on his fingertips Tuesday, what did you see? A low-priced “crippled” version of its bigger brothers? A device designed to lure away budget-minded consumers from Windows machines? Maybe. For now. What I saw was the future of Apple Computer: A device that fits anywhere in the home and […]

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.—Electronic Data Systems is choosing favorites. In an announcement from the Gartner ITxpo, the $20 billion a year computer systems integrator said that it is forming an “agility” alliance that will create a computing platform based on products from: Dell, Cisco Systems, EMC, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Xerox. Customers worldwide will be […]

AT&T and MCI may think that Vonage, Skype and other Internet-based suppliers of telephone service are the outfits they must worry the most about, as the cost of a minute of calling plummets toward zero. The fact they wont want to face is that their best customers—large businesses—may soon be their biggest competitors. If you […]

The day was sunny and warm in Waterloo, Wis., a low-key place where a truck stop operator can commute to work on a 16.5-horsepower Craftsman riding mower. Its 1997. Paul Andrews is taking a 20-minute spin on a Trek Y-Foil road bike. The bike is black, revealing its unpainted carbon fiber tubing. Attached at three […]

For the first 20 years of cellular communications, mobile handset users complained about dead zones and kept switching services to get reliable connections. In the next 20 years, organizations of all types will be seeking out dead zones. If they dont exist, theyll create them. Yes, thats right. You can hear me now. To date, […]

Vicki Silvera was under siege. Complaints, as the director of information technology for Vail Resorts recalls now, were pouring into “any forum” she could imagine. In e-mail, during managers meetings, in voicemail left with the companys chief financial officer, in dinner conversations around the relatively small town of Vail—the feedback was in. The new time-and-labor […]

While Ed Cone, senior writer for Baseline, was deftly delving into the ways that former governor Howard Dean is employing Web technologies to capture the Democratic nomination for president, I went to vote for the first time in Connecticut. The fact this was my first visit to the polls in my adopted home state said […]

Your employees probably expect their e-mail and computer use to be monitored. Theyd probably be shocked to find their phone calls on the watch list. And they almost certainly would be offended to know you kept track of each time they went to the bathroom. The bathroom? Yes. This I learned by accident. I was […]

Noveon needed to boost its returns, fast. So the billion-dollar specialty chemicals company loaded up on low-cost standard computers. The Task: Create an almost entirely new computing and communications infrastructure for a billion-dollar company. The components in place: IBM AS/400 minicomputers, for handling manufacturing and other operations; Sun Microsystems servers, for taking orders electronically; and […]