Bankruptcy is the most forgiving of all U.S. business regulations. While the word may conjure abject failure when applied to individuals, bankruptcy in the corporate world is regarded almost as part of the operational handbook. Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code is specifically geared toward extendin...

Hoping to bolster declining revenues and slipping market share, Gateway announced that it will market digital projectors to the SMB (small and medium business) and education markets. Digital projectors represent a new and heretofore untested product line for Gateway. "Gateway has been trying to dive...

Amid an overall high-tech slump, the unglamorous yet vital data storage sector has fared strikingly well. Even as IT buyers have struggled with meager budgets and analysts have forecast scant growth, storage giant EMC's stock price has doubled. Recently, though, a prominent name in the field, Storag...

Big enterprises are obvious sales targets for technology vendors. For both hardware and software providers, landing a big installation that affects thousands of workers is like hitting a home run. But the current economic climate is a stiff wind blowing in from the outfield, turning those prospectiv...

Wireless technology is gaining traction among consumers, especially as WiFi hot spots continue to proliferate. But in enterprise environments, adoption of wireless services has been slowed by cost and uncertainty about their value. Nevertheless, a new report by the Yankee Group forecasts an increase...

Web services is arguably the most important IT initiative of our time. Enterprise back ends, which have been cobbled together over decades with application-specific components from a variety of vendors, now can be (and increasingly must be) integrated and delivered to customers with a universality a...

In a massive upgrade and testing initiative, Microsoft is set to release 500,000 "beta 2" copies of Microsoft Office System, an enlarged and modernized version of the company's office productivity suite. The beta release marks one of Microsoft's most extensive testing programs ever, and by far the l...

So, you have a product or two. You want to expand your reach. The Internet sits at your fingertips. If you build it, will they come? Not necessarily. That is the big lesson of the bubble years -- and a quandary for small e-commerce companies at a time when venture capitalists are not feeling adventu...

The phrase "Real Time Enterprise" (RTE) is a siren song of unquestionable allure for many enterprises. Whether a company wishes to respond to customer data more quickly or communicate better internally, having a back end that responds immediately to the rapid flow of corporate information represents...

Pummeled by general economic woes and skidding demand for its handheld computers, Palm has announced a projected earnings shortfall, on the heels of the dismissal of nearly 20 percent of its staff. The company now faces a worst-case earnings scenario in which it might fall short of its December sale...

The e-commerce sector's recent successes are staggering. Combined sales of Amazon and eBay totaled US$19 billion in 2002, according to Forrester Research, and robust fourth-quarter numbers bucked the lackluster offline trend. But the path to those lofty results was paved with the failures of countle...

In the latest round of a corporate boxing match that has persisted for more than five years, Microsoft has filed a court brief accusing Sun Microsystems of unfair competition and violation of a previous settlement agreement. The brief is part of an ongoing private antitrust case brought against Micr...

The complaints are essentially the same, but the venue is different. Microsoft is under attack again for leveraging its monopoly and bundling its products, but this time its lines of defense are concentrated on the European front. In fact, it seems that so far, Europe's antitrust investigation has b...

Amazon's e-commerce triumphs are legendary. But every groundbreaking company must balance its successes against questionable experiments and outright failures. Paralleling Amazon's victories are product-category fizzles, the result of the company's near-constant efforts to morph into a universal dep...

In a two-pronged initiative, Sun Microsystems is launching new managed computing platforms and slashing prices of its mid-range and high-end server systems. With these new moves, Sun is seeking to modify its image as an elite provider of proprietary systems. "Sun has given notice that they are now s...

When it comes to enterprise e-mail, Microsoft Exchange on the back end and Microsoft Outlook on the front end are among the most frequent vectors for viruses and worms. The cost of downtime as a result of this malware plague is measured in dollars, lost productivity, disrupted communications, and ma...

On one hand, enterprise storage needs are increasing exponentially year after year. On the other hand, IT costs are controlled more fiercely than ever, often by non-IT executives. In this stingy environment, vendors are attempting to convince corporations to buy entirely new networks dedicated to da...