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In the middle of August, General Motors announced that it will have a new organizing principle: the Internet. The new business group, christened e-GM, will deliver real-time, interactive and customized relationships. "The Internet fundamentally changes the way business is conducted," said G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., president and chief operating officer. The trade sites such as InfoWorld covered this story extensively.
By 2004, you won't be talking about Internet companies
because all companies will have to be Internet companies.
Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, August 1999
There were two kinds of dinosaurs. Those that turned into birds and those that didn't. The birds are still around. GM is trying to turn into a bird by opening its supply chain. It will provide direct customer access into its manufacturing, distribution, and marketing processes and all the information about those processes. What does it look below like Ford is trying to do? Be the T. Rex of American industry?
Robert Lane knows some information about Ford and their cars that Ford doesn't want you to know. Ford doesn't claim that it's false information, just that it might discourage you from buying their cars. When Lane went to the Web, Ford went to court.
In late August, Lane's site, Blue Oval News, was issued a temporary restraining order by the U.S. federal courts on behalf of Ford Motor Company, effectively shutting down the site. According to Lane, it's a First Amendment issue. According to Ford, it's theft. I could find no mention of the problem or the court action by searching Ford's site. Meanwhile, you might want to see what's left of Lane's site. Hurry.
In most organizations, the computers used to stay in their own building or wing or room, as did the information technology (IT) professionals who fed and tended them. Now the PC on everyone's desktop has more power than most mainframes did back when those IT pros learned their jobs. Now the IT pros are roaming the halls troubleshooting everyone's PC.
Where does IT's job end and everyone else's begin? It's a moving target and a gray area. My answer today will change along with everything else having to do with computers. Please TALK back.
A recent survey by the Standish Group found that a third of in-house software projects never get finished. The survey also reports that nearly half of all projects cost 70 percent more than originally budgeted. Managers cite lack of user input as the main reason for project failure. In other words, the very people the project was supposed to benefit were excluded from the design process.
Save early, save often.
Search Engines: Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch
FrontPage 2000: new to FrontPage?
August use of RicciStreet.net, its parent site toLearn.net, and its affiliate site ClearLightStudio.com held steady compared to July.
Four new countries appeared on the August server logs: Mauritius, Pakistan, Slovenia, and Vietnam. Since two are in Asia and Mauritius is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I decided to learn more:
Asian Line (webmaster: Ricci Street Gazette subscriber Jone Le)
An August 27 front-page article titled "Books Go Begging" in The Buffalo News quotes Catherine Cornbleth, an education professor from the University at Buffalo. Comparing reading on computer to reading on paper, she said:
It's a different experience, when you have something in print in front of you. There isn't the same kind of working with a text when you're on a computer. There isn't the same kind of interaction, of processing, of talking back to a text. I think that's a problem.
Perhaps someone should post this quotation as a text on TALK. You could then interact by posting a reply. It would be somewhat like creating a text to talk back to her text. You could then invite Professor Cornbleth to reply to your text. Perhaps she could explain why what you did wasn't what you did: talking back to the text.
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