Salon.com > Salon Technology Staff

A second chance for the dot-com economy?

Wed, 15 Nov 2000 20:23:00 +0000

So Boo.com, the much-mocked, failed British clothing retail site, is back. But how the mighty have fallen -- the poster boy for unthinking dot-com excess has been reborn as a humble subsidiary of Fashionmall.com.

Ahead-of-the-curve public relations specialists should take note. Like other notorious new-economy blowouts such as DEN and BBQ.com, Boo become better known for flaming out than for anything the company ever did while alive.

In the 21st century, failure itself has become the bleeding-edge marketing strategy; bankruptcy is the ultimate branding event. But, in typical bumbling fashion, Boo missed out on the obvious opportunity presented by its high-profile 15 minutes in the cyber-sun. Boo should never have come back as a new version of its old stuff. In a world where brand recognition is all that counts, Boo should have completely remade itself -- perhaps as a Halloween products retailer, or a ghost portal.

Napster wins last-minute reprieve

Fri, 28 Jul 2000 20:39:00 +0000

A federal appeals court granted Napster a new lease on life Friday afternoon, only hours before a court-ordered deadline would have required the service to shut down.

In staying the injunction issued Wednesday by a federal district court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that Napster users could continue to swap MP3s while lawyers argue the case.

The appeals court also granted Napster's request for an expedited appeal of the injunction. Both Napster and the recording industry plaintiffs will file briefs over the next month, after which the appeals court will hear arguments and rule. So Napster has at least another two months or so of uptime.

"I am happy and grateful that we do not have to turn away our 20 million users and that we can continue to help artists," said Shawn Fanning, the 19-year-old creator of Napster. "We'll keep working and hoping for the best."

Naspter CEO Hank Barry, who earlier had suggested employees would likely be laid off if the injunction took effect, said on Friday he was "gratified and appreciative" of the appeals court reprieve. "I believe the Napster technology can help everyone involved in music -- including artists, consumers and the industry. New technologies can be a win-win situation if we work together on building new models -- and we at Napster are eager to do so," said Barry.

Showbiz reacts to Napster ruling

Fri, 28 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

As Napster fought an injunction that would shut down the MP3 file-swapping service Friday night, the stunned players on both sides of the issue sharpened their spins. Napster filed Thursday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for an emergency stay. The injunction granted Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel requires the service to prevent its 20 million users from trading any songs copyrighted by the 18 record labels suing the digital music start-up for copyright infringement. Here's what musicians, attorneys and industry executives had to say about the ruling, and the future of Napster and online file sharing.

Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, a decentralized file-swapping system

I think it is sad that issues of free speech are being ignored in this case; to me it is a free speech issue. All Napster is doing is telling people where they can download MP3s; they are not actually helping in the information transfer itself.

Still, this does demonstrate why it is important for information sharing systems to be decentralized like Freenet to prevent this kind of attack.

Name that software giant!

Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:15:00 +0000

"Welcome to Ted's Lemonade Stand. Would you like an Internet browser with your suite of applications? Don't forget to stop by Rock Rat Operating Systems to get the latest version of Windows, although our software runs on all OSes, of course."

Tedslemonade.com and rockrat.com are just two of the dozens of weird domain names that Microsoft has registered in recent months. Though Microsoft is fighting Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision to split the company in two, might it be preemptively snapping up promising URLs?

"These registrations are a window into Microsoft's corporate soul. You see the hopes, fears, desires and the business directions they're going in," says Alex Frankel, the president of Quiddity, a brand strategy and naming company, who tipped us off to the domain names.

Lemonade is always appealing, but surely, Redmond can do better than Rock Rat. We asked what advice you have for Microsoft if it faces a post-antitrust re-christening. Here are a few of your suggestions:

Micro-remedies

Thu, 11 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Though Microsoft has already been found guilty of violating antitrust laws, the company is adamant that it should not be forced to radically change its structure and apparently shocked that there should be any penalty associated with wrongdoing. In a strongly worded response to the Justice Department's proposal to break the software maker in two, Microsoft argued Wednesday that the government's remedy should be thrown out and a much milder set of conduct remedies should be implemented.

"Microsoft is asking the district court to dismiss the government's breakup proposal immediately," said Bill Neukom, Microsoft's executive vice president for law and corporate affairs. "Breaking up the company would be a punitive proposal that would fundamentally harm consumers, the industry and the American economy."

Such statements hardly come as a surprise, given Microsoft's vehement disagreement with both the Justice Department's case and the verdict of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. The company delivered a stack of documents to the court on Wednesday, including its argument against a breakup and a request for the judge to rule immediately on its proposals, so that it could put this nasty business behind it.

The Web whodunit

Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

So far, there are few clues pointing to a perpetrator or a motive
in this week's spectacular sabotage of the most popular sites on
the Web. But never fear, speculation abounds -- from the prosaic
"just a bunch of kids with time on their hands" to the flat-out
conspiratorial: Is President Clinton to blame, or those darn DeCSS
hackers?

Since we at Salon Technology don't have a clue what's motivating the
attackers, we thought we'd round up the usual suspects with a
brief survey of who's saying what.

The massive "denial of service" (DoS) attacks began on Monday,
causing a three-hour outage at Yahoo, and have continued on
Tuesday and Wednesday -- knocking out such Net heavyweights as
Amazon, Buy.com, eBay, CNN, E-Trade, Datek and ZDNet for a few
hours each. None of the sites has experienced anything more
severe than some downtime -- a dull fact that hasn't prevented
raucous headlines like "Hacker
Havoc on the Web" -- but both the government and the media
are treating the onslaught as a serious crime.

Why Bill stepped down

Tue, 18 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the hundreds of you who responded to our call for further entries to our Top 10 reasons Bill Gates stepped down, we're delighted to be able to provide you with this follow-up, carefully culled from your suggestions and submissions.

Responses clustered in a few predictable areas, some already mapped out in our original list: Gates wants out before the Justice Department breaks up Microsoft; Gates hears the hooves of Linux thundering at his gate; Gates is overwhelmed with Mac envy or Steve Jobs envy or Steve Case envy.

Many of you apparently feel that Gates is, in one form or another, the Antichrist or the Evil One -- or maybe a Faustian figure in cahoots with same. There are a lot of unkind thoughts out there about Bill's personal hygiene, which we have omitted (not because of excessively high standards of taste but because they're not that funny). We received many suggestions that the cream-pie-in-the-face incident lies at the heart of Gates' decision. Finally, a surprising number of you seem to think Gates is prepping a presidential run.

Joke? With this year's roster of candidates, who can really say?