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"That (easy installation) would be a hallmark of SQL Server," Forrester research director Philip Russom told the E-Commerce Times. IBM's DB2 and Oracle's 9i have a reputation for being more difficult and time-consuming to install, he said. But Robert Shimp, vice president of ...

It used to be you couldn't coax Apple Computer into breathing a word about enterprise-class computing. When you mentioned selling to the suits, Macintosh marketing folks would get fidgety and flip to the next PowerPoint slide. This was surprisingly true during the tenure of Gil Amelio, whose idea of enterprise strategy was the truly strange marriage of Macintosh and IBM's AIX for Apple hardware. Under Amelio, Apple was sometimes insanely weird.

Earlier this month, Yahoo unveiled a slimmed-down, Google-like search product of its own -- a clear nod to the threat that Google, which has been a longtime business partner, poses. In fact, Forrester analyst Paul Sonderegger told the E-Commerce Times that in making its move, Yahoo started the latest battle for consumer eyeballs...

Intel has not lost its chipmaking edge, but a phenomenon of diminishing returns may be forcing the company to make difficult choices. InStat/MDR chip analyst Thomas Halfhill told the E-Commerce Times that as each new chip ships with a higher clock speed, Intel struggles to bridge the widening performance gap between chip speed and other, slower parts of the PC, such as disk and memory. "They're still getting improved performance with each new chip, but they need to work harder to come up with things like faster front side buses or cache memory," Halfhill said.

"They're trying to tackle the cost side and are doing what they can to revive growth by diversifying their product lineup," Beaulieu told the E-Commerce Times. He added that an uptick in the economy will be critical to Gateway's plan to focus more on high-cost, high-margin products like expensive consumer electronics...

On the 15th, response time actually improved, with tax sites averaging 1.95 seconds. Availability slipped to 99.2 percent, but Lovett told the E-Commerce Times that this drop was attributable in part to last-minute maintenance performed by some sites before the final rush began.

IDC research director Stephen Minton told the E-Commerce Times it is possible that enterprises will rein in spending on technology even more until there is a clear sign of economic recovery. "A double-dip IT recession cannot be ruled out yet," Minton said. "Companies counting...

Adi Kishore, an analyst at the Yankee Group, told the E-Commerce Times that eBay is, quite simply, an e-commerce rock in a world of marshmallows. "They have a very sound model," he said. "That's become a given. They also lead the industry on providing an incredibly solid back-end, and that shouldn't be taken for granted."

Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times thatalthough Microsoft has continued to drive sales of software in an otherwise bleak tech spending environment and has seen tablet PCs start to take root, the software giant now may be starting to question whether sales of personal computers to consumers will recover anytime this year or early in 2004...

"There will always be some subset of transactions impacted by the sales, at least enough to make the consumer think twice," comScore vice president Daniel Hess told the E-Commerce Times. "But overall, I believe consumers already had the expectation that this was part of the cost of whatever they're buying." ...

Although IBM has taken a battering during the downturn, cutting some 15,000 jobs since 2001, the technology slump also has helped it and other brand-name companies. In general, large companies have benefited from customers' desire to deal with reputable firms that they know will be around in the future, Giga Information Group research fellow Mike Gilpin told the E-Commerce Times.

To place a text ad, advertisers choose which keywords they want to target. On Google, keywords are auctioned off: The higher the bid, the higher the ad will appear on the search results page. Click-through performance also factors in. The higher the click-through rate, the less costly the text link. "Irrelevant ads are dropped down the page, and advertisers who are more relevant will save money," Andrew Goodman, principal at search engine optimization firm Page Zero Media, told the E-Commerce Times...

"If you look at how PCs are sold today, it's all about the listening and viewing experience," Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle told the E-Commerce Times. Although it has made serious inroads into the entertainment PC market only in recent quarters, Microsoft has mad...

Adam Engst, the publisher of Mac community newsletter TidBits, told the E-Commerce Times there is no question that Apple is targeting Microsoft's weaker offerings with its new software "Neither Internet Explorer nor PowerPoint had been significantly improved in quite some time...

FTC spokesperson Claudia Bourne Farrell told the E-Commerce Times that the FTC is urging consumer groups, law enforcement personnel and e-mail marketers, among others, to attend. "We want to get a better sense of what spam means to the consumer and to the Internet industry as...

"The danger is ending up with what I'd call a direct-attached SAN," Kenniston said, suggesting that tying four or five terabytes of data directly to a couple of servers does not constitute a network. "What you want to do is to plan long term for a single network, rather than isolated storage systems that will later have to be joined together." He told the E-Commerce Times that the stakes are high, because choosing the wrong path and creating multiple islands of data can make it hard to secure sensitive information, such as customer data for an e-commerce site...

For the most part, they are Cobol and Fortran systems that date back as far as the 1960s, Kathleen Ryan, a spokesperson for IBM, told the E-Commerce Times. "These apps grew along with the companies. If you're operating a manufacturing plant using one of these applications, you can't just pull it down" and work on replacing it. In addition, it costs about 80 cents of every dollar of the average software budget to maintain such legacy systems...

Windows NT 4.0, still a widely used platform in many enterprises, will reach its end-of-life at the close of 2003, meaning no more support will be forthcoming from Redmond. Companies that decide to upgrade will find that Win2003 is their only choice. "There's really no other way to go, save moving to another platform," Gartner vice president David Smith told the E-Commerce Times. "If you want to continue to use Windows, you won't really have any other choice after 4.0 is no longer supported."

In fact, telecom stabilization may cover up continued weakness in other sectors, CGC CEO John A. Challenger told the E-Commerce Times. Layoffs by electronics firms actually doubled in the quarter to 26,270. Job cuts at computer makers rose 29 percent, and e-commerce firms laid off 28 percent more workers than a year ago.

"If the stars align perfectly, there could be considerable pent-up demand for computer equipment and services released," Aberdeen Group chief research officer Peter Kastner told the E-Commerce Times. "Some companies may get caught short, but I think most have been waiting for the turnaround for a while."