Business

After announcing its .NET initiative in mid-2000, then backing it up with a slew of releases and hype, Microsoft clearly was hoping 2002 would be the year Web services took off. But the calendar has flipped to 2003, .NET is not as far along as anticipated, and some observers are wondering if the sof...

Total security for a corporate network may be a goal of many IT executives, but no matter how much a company invests in security systems, breaches -- originating either outside or inside a network -- are a fact of life in the information age. By budgeting for the extra resources needed to respond to...

In a ruling hailed by some as a major victory in the recording industry's battle against online piracy -- but decried by others as a threat to Web privacy -- a judge has ordered an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of a voracious file-swapper to the RIAA. The RIAA has not said wheth...

Increasingly, Fortune 500 enterprises are turning to e-business software to enable real-time transactions and data exchange. This hot sector is crowded with software firms, each vying to peddle integrated suites for supply chain management, CRM, e-procurement, fulfillment and logistics. How can an e...

As tenures at companies go, Steve Case's trajectory at AOL was similar to that of a bullet fired straight up -- it ascends at a fast rate but eventually plummets. Last week, Case resigned his AOL chairmanship under pressure from stockholders who have lost tens of billions of dollars since the AOL Ti...

U.S. consumers plan to spend $4.8 billion online during the first quarter of 2003, up from $4.6 billion in the year-ago period, according to a survey released Friday. In addition, the number of consumers who said they plan to shop online in the first three months of this year increased 9 percent com...

E-commerce, once the domain of "geek types" or consumers with high disposable incomes, has hit the mainstream. The U.S. Census Bureau says e-commerce spending increased by more than 34 percent year over year to $11.1 billion from the third quarter of 2001 to the same period in 2002. But the Census B...

Microsoft has won another legal victory as a judge has barred two industry groups, backed by several of Microsoft's rivals, from appealing the settlement the software giant reached with the U.S. Department of Justice on antitrust charges. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the ong...

Steve Case has announced he will resign as AOL's chairman, following a lengthy battle to meld old and new media after the company's 2001 acquisition of Time Warner. In a statement, Case said the difficult decision to step down was influenced by growing shareholder concern over the company's post-mer...

In the wake of the dot-com collapse and subsequent recession, it is easy to shun e-commerce hype -- but to do so altogether would be short-sighted. The ideas that drove the initial boom are still valid and in fact have flourished. Customers and businesses really have forged direct connections over ...

Fewer high-tech workers lost their jobs in 2002 than in 2001 as layoffs declined 33 percent, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas (CGC). Strikingly, there were only 4,496 layoffs by e-commerce companies in 2002, compared with more than 56,000 in the previous year. But consid...

In a holiday shopping season that was strong across the board for e-commerce but relatively weak for offline retailers, video gaming got a turbo-powered boost. Leading console maker Sony sold 8.5 million PlayStation2 units worldwide, up 24 percent compared with the 2001 holiday period. In North Amer...

On paper, Symantec appears to be one of the hottest tech companies around. Propelled in part by users' need to defend against a rash of destructive and well-publicized computer worms like Code Red, Nimda and SirCam, its stock price has jumped 70 percent in the past year. Nonetheless, leading industr...

Gateway has revealed that its fourth-quarter earnings will not meet expectations because a flurry of promotional offers, including a first-ever two-for-one offer on PCs, failed to lift sales to sufficient levels. The company said it expects to book sales of $1.06 billion, well short of its earlier e...

Holiday sales rose 24 percent over last year's levels to $13.7 billion, boosted by strong growth in online clothing sales and changes in the makeup of the Web shopping population, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings. Still, the biggest test of the...