December 28, 1999
NY Times: Time of Turmoil at Willy Loman & Co..
For six months, he searched for a sales position that would be "immune" from the Internet. Finally, in May, he landed one, with Parker Interior Plantscape, a company in Scotch Plains, N.J., that designs floral landscapes for office buildings and hotels.
InfoWorld: Holidays offer lessons to e-tailers.
But Cohen believes e-tailers are also getting a bad wrap on customer service, especially when compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. E-tailers provide better customer service, not worse, by being able to answer more detailed technical questions than a seasonal worker at a traditional retail outlet can...
News.Com: Study: Web success to be measured in new ways.
Forecasts like Schmitt's go to the heart of doubts about soaring stock valuations for ".com" companies, which have risen on expectations of great things to come. Although analysts, executives and investors have developed creative ways of ferreting value out of raw traffic numbers, the coming year could spark growing demand for more detailed and harder evidence of success.
CIO: Making Beautiful Music.
In the following vignettes, you'll meet some companies that are trying to collaborate better with customers, among employees and with business partners. Their stories illustrate the recurring theme one hears from experts: Collaboration is not about technology; it's about culture and training.
TechWeb: Talk City CEO Chats About Online Communities.
Q&A with Peter Friedman, president and CEO of Talk City. Community is the most distinguishing part of the Internet. It allows people to engage [in chats], and it's fundamental to the human condition. It's market research where a product manager with a credit card can construct a survey and run it.
CIO: Inventing the Enterprise.
What is it that inspires, or allows, someone to invent something as bedrock as packet-switching, as seminal as the Internet protocol? Necessity—that is, personal necessity. Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet all started life as internal solutions to departmental problems, with no thought of the marketplace beyond.
News.Com: Coalition sues to bar distribution of DVD cracking tool.
The lawsuit names individuals who registered Web sites from California, New York, Australia, Denmark and other areas, as well as dozens of "John Does," charging that they are facilitating the illegal copying of DVDs by posting the DeCSS program on their sites or "knowingly" linking to it.
ZDNN: Is iWon destined to be a loser?
But analysts call the cash giveaway a cheap shot at entering the portal market. Despite the traffic figures, they remain skeptical that iWon will ever make more money than it has to spend to lasso customers. "If you run a heavy TV campaign saying you're giving away money, the curious will click," Allen said. "It's a huge traffic driver, but that doesn't mean the company has a long-term future."
Business Week: Google Can End Your Search for a Great Search Site.
No banner ads, no "extra services" offered, no tiny type that's hard to read. Compare that to the information overload that assaults you when you go to most portal pages to do a search. Eventually, you'll see banner ads on the search results page, Brin says. But he promises that the home page will always retain its clean and crisp style.
CIO: Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow.
Today, organizations like the United States Postal Service and brick-and-mortar retailers use scenario planning to understand the effects of external factors on their businesses, whether they be technology driven (e-mail and e-commerce), political (deregulation) or economic (sudden downturns).
SJ Mercury: Net dims popular economic gauges.
As consumer and business activity shift to the largely unmeasured Internet, current economic gauges such as the purchasing managers' survey could become less reliable. That would hamper decisions based on those data such as whether bonds are a good buy or whether the Federal Reserve will raise or lower interest rates.
BBC News: Greenwich could mark web time.
The idea of Get is to provide a common standard for all electronic commerce around the world. But it would also maintain the status of the Greenwich Observatory as the home of time for the next millennium.
Boston Globe: E-retailers note: It's service, stupid.
John Theriault, PricewaterhouseCoopers. We bought into the fallacy that we could go online and finish that holiday shopping list with just a few clicks. Our collective fantasy, fanned by an endless barrage of ads, raised expectations to unrealistic heights for a medium that is so new its most well-known and respected merchant is only four years old.
USA Today: Clinton to crack down on Net drug sales.
But they are hampered when the patient lives in one state, the pharmacist in another and the operator in a third, said Dr. Jane Henney, FDA commissioner. ''Many of the traditional safeguards that have been in place for many years are breaking down,'' she said.
|
