Business 2.0

Loudcloud announced this week that it would exit the Web outsourcing business. Does that mean you should think about running your website in-house? Not necessarily. As recently as a year ago, managed service providers (MSPs) seemed to be a pretty good bet. The idea behind them made sense: Instead of

Truant officers in Boston are testing a new system that shows how mobile applications are supposed to work. Elliot Feldman, director of alternative education for Boston Public Schools, has no illusions about his job. Among other duties, he oversees the school system’s truant officers and meets with

Web merchants are flooded with so much information on consumer traffic that they can’t make sense of it all. A new software system might help. When you enter a department store, there’s a good chance that your every move is being watched and assessed. You might think that the same thing is happening

The ISP market is about as orderly as a medieval bazaar. Fortunately, new route-control products may give corporate buyers an edge. You might think that the market for Internet bandwidth would be a paragon of capitalist rationality. After all, isn’t bandwidth a commodity? And isn’t it all about movi

How do you run an IT department on a tight budget? Two words: Linux and eBay. Five years ago, if you had proposed running some of your company’s most critical applications on an operating system originally developed by a longhaired Finnish teenager and given away for free, your IT manager would have

The economy may have slowed down, but that doesn’t mean the pace of technological change has abated. If anything, choices about technology are getting harder to make — you have a smaller budget to work with and more options for how to spend it. Upgrade your network infrastructure to gigabit Ethernet

I waded barefoot into the middle of a religious war with my recent article on Web services and Java (see “Is Java Obsolete?“). I haven’t seen such an outpouring of techie shock and rage since the Amiga was canceled. “Your article is so bad I have to believe it is an April Fool’s joke,” wrote […]

Sun’s programming language is great for linking corporate applications to the Internet. Trouble is, Web services promise to do the same thing. from Business 2.0, April 2002 issue At Ford Financial, the financial services arm of Ford Motor, Java is the glue that ties together the company’s disparate

Sun Microsystems brought a civil suit against Microsoft last Friday, alleging that the Redmond-based company unfairly used its operating-system monopoly to undermine Java. (Lawsuits against Microsoft are becoming so popular that I predict you’ll soon be able to file one at your local ATM.) Sun’s mov

Deleted e-mail and computer files have a nasty habit of coming back at the most awkward times — like in the middle of a lawsuit. What can you do about it? When you feed a piece of paper into a shredder, the resulting pile of strips is good for little more than packing material. The […]

Public relations pros have long monitored newspapers and magazines for coverage of their companies. Internet-savvy PR people add online discussion boards and Usenet forums to their tracking lists in order to stay on top of rumors that could move their companies’ stock prices or affect sales of their

There are a few occasions during which information systems have to function absolutely perfectly, with no margin for error and zero tolerance for downtime: military invasions, open-heart surgery, major financial transactions — and Super Bowl Sunday. In preparation for this weekend’s game, the Nation