Stories by: Stacy Cowley

As the World Wide Web evolves into a more collaborative platform, the technologies and business models involved in that transition are being swept up into the "Web 2.0" rubric, a term vague enough to encompass almost anything one cares to push under its banner, but catchy in summing up the widespread sense that the Internet is at a tipping point.

SAP has made its long-awaited dive into the hosted, subscription customer relationship management on demand market, launching a new software service with a starting monthly price tag of $US75 per user. But SAP won't be going head-to-head with on-demand trailblazers such as Salesforce.com: Its system carries a 100-user minimum, restricting its potential customers to the enterprise clients SAP traditionally targets.

Salesforce.com's recent spate of outages has left some of the hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software provider's customers venting about the company's poor track record of keeping its users updated on service problems. It is also underlying the importance of negotiating and enforcing SLAs (service level agreements) when trusting key IT functionality to outside vendors.

A group of top industry vendors plans to announce on Wednesday a new community initiative aimed at popularizing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language), the nickname given to a collection of software development tools and standards that help Web applications mimic the speed and smoothness of desktop programs.

Salesforce.com's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) service had a widespread outage on Monday, the second time in recent weeks the on-demand software provider has suffered a serious crash.

Microsoft is merging its Exchange and Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) groups into a new unit called the Unified Communications Group, the company announced Monday. The change is aimed at aligning development work on Microsoft's e-mail platform with that done around other communications systems like instant messaging, Web conferencing and phone/VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol).

It took Google more than a year to make the decision that offering a censored version of its search services in China would be a lesser evil than boycotting business in the country altogether, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

3Com on Friday named R. Scott Murray its new chief executive officer (CEO), replacing retiring CEO Bruce Claflin, who announced earlier this month that he would step down after five years of helming the networking vendor.

CA is shuffling its executive ranks, naming technology strategist Mark Barrenechea as its new chief technology officer (CTO).

IBM ended 2005 with strong earnings, but essentially flat sales, as it reported net income for the year of $US8 billion on revenue of $US91.1 billion.

Salesforce.com went live this week with a heavily publicized major update, adding a new platform called AppExchange for easily deploying third-party applications to extend the functionality of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) system.