Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

About

Editor-in-Chieftst@ziffdavisenterprise.comTom was editor-in-chief of Interactive Week, from 1995 to 2000, leading a team that created the Internet industry's first newspaper and won numerous awards for the publication. He also has been an award-winning technology journalist for the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Symantec Admits to One Enormous Mistake with Veritas Buy

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 Hopes SAP Can Help Boost Sales

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 […]

Southwest Airlines: High Tech, Low Costs

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 […]

Apple v. Google: A Matter of Timing

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 […]

EDS Changes Directions, Intends to Show Bias

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 […]

Say Hello to Your New Phone Company: You

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 […]

Trek Bicycle Corp: Tour de Force

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 […]

Why You Will Come to Love Dead Zones

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, […]

Slippery Slope: Vail Resorts and PeopleSoft

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 […]

Making Voting a Simpler Exercise

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 […]