Spotlight Features

Purveyors of interactive online games have hit upon an audience-pleasing business model, featuring methods like subscription plans that give users unlimited access for a monthly fee. But firms in other areas of e-commerce likely will be hard-pressed to emulate gaming companies' success using the sam...

The 64-bit microprocessors coming down the pike from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices 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 in the short term, businesses may not want t...

A recent Goldman Sachs report pushed back a meaningful rebound in corporate IT spending until mid-2003 at the earliest, predicting flat numbers until then. But amid the gloom inherent in this and other dour forecasts, tech bright spots remain in both the enterprise and consumer markets. For example,...

When Amazon.com announced its second-quarter 2002 results, its outlook seemed promising: Sales of books, CDs and DVDs were up 20 percent compared with the year-ago period. The company's first-quarter report also was positive, showing a 15 percent increase from the first quarter of 2001. However, not...

Server technology improvements are poised to turbocharge the way companies run their e-commerce operations, ranging from the way they process transactions to the methods they use to snag new sales. For example, IBM has been developing "self-learning" software that not only ties servers together, but...

Many online retailers have spent considerable time and money trying to duplicate the success of Amazon.com, but the market conditions that spawned Amazon no longer exist, according to Giga Information Group analyst Andrew Bartels. "It is unlikely that any existing retailer would let you take over a ...

For e-tailers, the quest for the perfect online customer -- who spends thousands of dollars per year on a wide variety of merchandise and returns repeatedly to order more goods -- is like the search for the Holy Grail. Although the ideal may not be attainable, all merchants look for certain key char...

In the post-boom era of e-commerce, the gurus whose ideas and actions set the bar and tone for the industry may seem familiar. Although yesteryear's fast-growth mantra has been replaced by a different chant -- profits, profits! -- first-wave icons like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Meg Whitman of eBay ar...

Before Steve Jobs retook the reins at Apple 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. One key reason for its success is A...

There is little question that the number of home users accessing the Internet via broadband will continue to grow. By the end of 2002, the Yankee Group has estimated, 16 million broadband subscribers will be online in the United States, in addition to 54 million dial-up users. And widespread adoptio...