Articles by Brad Hill

Hoping to bolster declining revenues and slipping market share, Gateway announced that it will market digital projectors to the SMB (small andmedium business) and education markets. Digital projectors represent a newand heretofore untested product line for Gateway Gateway is the fourth-largest computer maker and has struggled to remain oneven groun...

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 data storage field, StorageNetworks, released a thunderclap of bad news: Two board members had resigned in the wake of a revised business plan and the elimination of 80 jobs last fall...

Big enterprises are obvious sales targets for technology vendors. For bothhardware 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 prospective homers into long outs. Another strategy -- the one-base-at-a-time approach -- is needed...

Web services is arguably the most important IT initiative of our time. Whereasenterprise back ends have been cobbled together over decades, using application-specific components from a variety of vendors, they now can be (and increasingly must be) integrated and delivered to customers with a universality and coherence unimagined 10 years ago But th...

In a massive upgrade and testing initiative, Microsoft is set to release500,000 "beta 2" copies of Microsoft Office System, an enlarged andmodernized 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 largest test of an Office product. The commercial version of MicrosoftOffice System is slated for mid-2003...

So, you have a product or two. You want to expand your reach. The globalInternet 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 adventurous How can small sites build a reputation,...

The phrase "Real Time Enterprise" (RTE) is a siren song of unquestionable allurefor many enterprises. Whether a company wishes to respond to customer data morequickly or communicate better internally, having a back end that responds immediatelyto the rapid flow of corporate information represents an ideal So, given the obvious benefits of on-demand...

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 countless dot-coms and brick-and-click firms whose initial online endeavors were unsteady and fraught with errors...

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 Microsoft by Sun At issue is Microsoft's freedom to di...

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. The European Union Antitrust Authority has been pursuing an investigation into the software giant's business practice...

Bad things happen to good software. In particular, security transgressionshappen to very popular software, more because it presents a big target thanbecause of an inherently frail constitution. Such is the case with Microsoft's widely installed enterprise e-mail solutions, Exchange and Outlook Both Exchange on the back end and Outlook as the front-...

The squeeze is on, as unstoppable forces meet immovable objects. On onehand, enterprise storage needs are increasing exponentially year after year.On the other hand, IT costs are controlled more fiercely than ever, often bynon-IT executives. A Gartner report predicts 2003 will be the third consecutive year in which companies will remain cautious buyers, opting to wring usefulness from aging equipment rather than invest in new technology...