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Corporate America is outsourcing an increasing number and variety of jobs to foreign shores, a trend that few industry experts predict will slow, let alone reverse, in coming months and years. Recently, the AFL-CIO -- citing a report by Gartner -- reported that by the end of next year, one out of ev...

Oracle Corp. has asked a court to toss out PeopleSoft's customer assurance program, saying the company's cash guarantees amount to an attempt to block Oracle's hostile takeover bid and lock in pay packages for PeopleSoft executives. In the motion filed with the Delaware court that is handling other ...

No matter how powerful notebook computers get, sooner or later all systems are limited by how long their battery can endure. Indeed, battery life always has been a major bottleneck for notebooks, and it seems the bigger the computer and the more features it has, the shorter its battery life is. This...

Last week, Apple's iTunes Music Store sold five times as many songs as the newly reborn Napster service. According to SoundScan, iTunes accounted for about 80 percent of all legally downloaded music files during the week. And at an analyst meeting Wednesday night, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented that...

Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2004 to manufacturers, completing a lengthy product-customization process that began when the software giant acquired Connectix earlier this year. The Redmond, Washington-based company also said it will lower the sticker price of Virtual PC dramatically -- by $100, ...

Overstock.com, which offers up to 80 percent off the sticker price of items ranging from dresses to computers, has become a favorite bargain-hunting destination for many online shoppers. Yet the road was not always so smooth for the company. Unlike some of its e-commerce brethren, it did not have ab...

Although everyday use of a corporate name likely means the company has achieved significant success, if a company name becomes a verb or a popular dictionary word, it enters the public domain and the company loses its intellectual property rights -- witness Kleenex, Fridge and Hoover, to name just a...

Chipmaker AMD has said it sees signs of improving market conditions and will start "selectively hiring" during 2004 to meet an anticipated increase in demand. The company said it expects to post a profit in the fourth quarter and is optimistic about at least the first half of 2004, thanks to what ex...

With many online behemoths still struggling to turn a profit in the e-commerce sector, small and medium businesses may question whether the online sales model is truly a road to riches or just a pipedream. In the latest trend, many companies are abandoning their aging homegrown systems in favor of p...

Cisco Systems blew past Wall Street targets for revenue and earnings in its first quarter as telecommunications companies, government agencies and consumers helped power the Internet gear maker's sales to strong growth. The company said revenue in the quarter totaled $5.1 billion, up from $4.8 billi...

As everyone knows well, there was a time when you couldn't swing a hastily written business plan without finding someone so pie-eyed optimistic about the tech sector they'd break open their kid's piggy bank to help fund it. How things change. Today, you can't toss your underwater stock options out t...

The first installment of this two-part series explored the notion that despite consumers' increasing demand for strong multimedia capabilities, vendors' low-end notebook computers can be a suitable replacement for home desktop PCs. When consumers deduct the cost of a flat-screen LCD panel from a not...

Microsoft has set up a $5 million "reward fund" to pay bounties to anyone who can track down writers of certain malicious code. Right now, the company is offering to pay two $250,000 bounties for information that leads to the capture and conviction of the authors of the SoBig and Blaster worms. Micr...

I'm an experienced software engineer, not a Microsoft apologist. Moreover, my company makes a living patching the holes in Microsoft operating systems. In a manner of speaking, their lemons are my lemonade. But the pile-on occurring in the press and the software community is neither justified nor sm...

Executive road warriors probably would not want to tote Dell's $849 Inspiron 1100 or Gateway's $699 M305S. However, while sub-$1,000 notebook computers may be bulkier and less technologically cutting-edge than their more streamlined siblings, they still pack a powerful punch for a consumer's buck. I...