Articles by Teri Robinson

With the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq a done deal and its strong reputation intact, the new HP seems well positioned to remain a leading force in the global IT arena In the last few months, the company has shrugged off criticism of the much-talked-about marriage. HP CEO Carly Fiorina recently told industry analysts that the company has met ...

Apple has made it a priority to lure small businesses to the Mac OS platform, reasoning that those businesses will be willing to abandon Windows in favor of a network that is easier to maintain without tremendous IT resources Granted, adopting an Apple solution is more costly initially, Al Gillen, director of infrastructure software research at IDC...

"Where there's a will, there's a way" could be the tagline of messaging provider Critical Path, which in just two years dumped its management team, shed its considerable debt, extracted itself from extraneous business pursuits, rid itself of shareholder lawsuits, brokered a lucrative financing deal and began to forge partnerships with successful and reputable companies, such as Hewlett-Packard...

It may be an overused phrase, but it is still a fact that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and this rule certainly has held true in e-commerce. Large companies like Amazon and Dell have been vocal in announcing their online presence and have built loyal customer bases as a result. But there is still abundant opportunity for less-established e-commerce sites to trumpet their existence to the world -- or at least the part of the world they are targeting -- without spending millions of dollars on large-scale ad campaigns...

Once upon a time, the performance of bellwethers like Cisco told the economic fortunes of the technology sector as a whole. But Cisco's dismal financial showings over the last two years have left some industry observers wondering whether the company still wields much influence Although Cisco certainly still has an influence in the tech sector, its ...

Just three years ago, those interested in an e-commerce career simply had to stand around and jobs would drop into their hands like fruit falling from an overburdened apple tree. But the economy's long decline has forced many companies out of business, and many of the remaining players have slashed their staffs to the bone, making e-commerce jobs far harder to come by. Even so, there are jobs out there, though many are well hidden and take longer to land...

The much-talked-about 64-bit microprocessors coming down the pike from Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) may one day help PC servers rival the power of Unix boxes and may transform the PC desktop. But experts do not expect users to adopt these new processors right away. And an important question looms: Do businesses really want to make the switch to 64-bit computing? In the short term, the answer is probably no...

Many online retailers have spent considerable time and money trying to duplicatethe success of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), and some say the market is ripe for a new e-commerce giant to rise from the wreckage of the dot-com economy and take the market by storm But the market conditions that spawned Amazon no longer exist, according to Giga Informatio...

Before Steve Jobs retook the reins at Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) in 1997, many in the industry had begun to sound the death knell for the innovative but beleaguered company But in a stunning turnaround, Apple pulled itself out of a pool of red ink and began booking positive earnings. Now, despite shrinking market share -- about 4 percent compare...

Allocating precious budget dollars is always a challenge in a down economy, and with security threats seeming to loom at every turn, chief information officers are struggling mightily to gauge risks and decide how to counter them This is far from a black-and-white issue. In a Morgan Stanley survey of 225 CIOs, security software ranked second behind...

Intel has adjusted its guidance for the third quarter, saying that revenue will fall within the US$6.3 billion to $6.9 billion range it previously provided. However, the company narrowed that range, aiming toward the lower end. "Intel expects revenue to be slightly below the midpoint" of the original range, Paul Otellini, the company's president a...

A coalition of consumer groups has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to step up its efforts to ban spam. The Telecommunications Research and Action Center (TRAC), the National Consumers League and Consumer Action told the commission that the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail should be classified as an unfair and deceptive trade practice...

A bankruptcy judge has nixed the sale of Napster to Bertelsmann AG, virtually ensuring that the online music service will not reopen its doors anytime soon In the music industry's long war against Napster and other free online file-sharing services, Bertelsmann has been a strong ally and savior, investing US$85 million in Napster while it was opera...

As scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other U.S. corporations have shown, corporate America is desperately in need of new -- and honest -- leadership One of the most befuddling traits of the Internet economy has been the tendency for companies to recycle executives, no matter how poorly or questionably they have performed, shelling out big bucks in th...

Noting that corporate clients appear to be more tight-fisted with their IT dollars, Sun Microsystems lowered its revenue forecast for its fiscal 2003 first quarter, which ends in September In July, the company said that first-quarter fiscal 2003 revenues would be 10 percent to 15 percent less than the US$3.4 billion that Sun posted in the fourth qu...

A grand jury has indicted former WorldCom chieffinancial officer Scott Sullivan and Bernard Yates,the company's onetime director of general accounting,on seven counts associated with their roles in the "misplacement" of nearly US$8 billion worth of WorldCom funds The jury handed down one count of fraud against Sullivan, which means he could be sent...

The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's investigation of fraud at e-mail services firm Critical Path has yielded charges against three former company executives for participating in a plan to fraudulently bolster financials in 2000. Two of the accused have agreed to settle the case The SEC has set its sights on Jonathan A. Beck, former regional...

Online advertising giant DoubleClick has announced it will pay US$450,000 and revamp its business practices to end a privacy investigation launched nearly three years ago by the attorneys general of 10 states Over the course of the inquiry, investigators sought to discern whether DoubleClick misused personal information gleaned from consumers and, ...

Negotiations have broken down between Texas Instruments and Korean chipmaker-for-hire Dongbu Electronics, dashing Dongbu's hopes oflanding a US$400 million annual contract with the technology giant If Dongbu and Texas Instruments had reached an agreement, the Korean company would have sold $400 million worth of chips to Texas Instruments. In additi...

Microsoft has stepped up what promises to be an interesting battle with AOL by planning to offer its MSN subscription service to users of Apple's Mac OS X operating system The announcement comes shortly after AOL opted to use Netscape browser technology, rather than Internet Explorer, in its new version for the Mac. At the time, analysts noted that...