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“That’s not going to change”

While driving to Reading, Pennsylvania, earlier this week to visit Maestro Sidney Rothstein for a conducting lesson (more on Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture later), I tuned in to Bloomberg radio. The reporter was interviewing John Thain, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange (NYX), which had just started its first day as a public company. The […]

Phone Service

Chris Herot, from Lexington, Massachusetts, wrote in response to the prior post about the telephone services offered at the Stamford Marriott. He agrees there is a "declining number of people will pay those outrageous charges by raising the price for the few suckers who remain". He provided an example where upon checking out of a hotel […]

Merger Benefits

One company acquiring another company can be a very good thing for customers, shareholders, and management. In the past ten years IBM has made nearly 50 acquisitions that have allowed it to broaden and deepen its Websphere middleware for the Internet. There have been numerous financial services companies that have used mergers as a way […]

Five Days?

I have written a number of stories in patrickWeb about web services, a set of standards that allow for web sites to send messages to each other. If you have any doubts about whether this is needed, consider the following. I went to American Express’s MemberMiles site to move some miles to Continental Airlines. The […]

Two Percent – Chapter 5

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce has announced that their estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2004 was $17.6 billion, an increase of 4.7 percent from the second quarter of 2004 and 21.5 percent from the third quarter of 2003. E-commerce sales in the third quarter accounted for […]