Stories about: General Electric

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

Monday's announcement that Salesforce.com would provide Google Apps for free to its customers sparked off a debate among analysts about whether Google's web-based software can make inroads with large businesses, and specifically the Fortune 500.

From adversity to opportunity: Scott's new job is good for him and for CIOs in general.

Executive recruiters say a public firing such as Microsoft's ex-CIO Stuart Scott endured can seriously injure a career but doesn't have to end one.

In addition to the question of what corporate policy now-former Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott violated to lead to his termination by the company on Monday, many other unknowns remain.

Why would a successful CIO leave one company to become co-CIO of another with only one-third the revenue and employees? Answer: The new company is Microsoft. Stuart Scott moved there in mid-2005 from General Electric, the US$160 billion, 319,000-employee behemoth where he had worked for 17 years, most recently as CIO of GE Industrial Systems. Then, about a year ago, co-CIO Ron Markezich was tapped to run Microsoft's budding managed services business. Scott has been Microsoft's sole CIO since then.

E-mail attachments have become a staccato series of shooting pains for many a CIO. Today's attachments --packed with images, presentations, PDFs, video clips and other space gluttons -- keep getting bigger, with no end in sight. They can bloat your servers, clog your systems and slow user mailbox opening to a crawl (prompting help desk calls).

The newspaper business is bad and getting worse. The Web is stealing the industry's readers, advertisers, revenues and even its enthusiasm for the business. But as newspapers struggle to respond, lessons for other industries confronting disruptive technologies are emerging

The monarch was dead. Demoralized and shaken, the organization spent time mourning for a popular and high-profile CIO who had reigned for many years. Then, with time starting to dull the pain, the young princes began sharpening their knives, sensing their best opportunity in years to seize power

There are some new kids on the block — and finding the best way to handle them is becoming a preoccupation for a coterie of Baby Boomer CIOs unused to dealing with such impetuous youth

The process of mobilizing enterprise business applications remains in its early stages, but software makers, device manufacturers, and customers are all currently working to foster increased wireless adoption.