Stories about: Southwest Airlines

Companies like Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and the makers of Motrin have all learned the hard way that online assaults from external users on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter can damage their brands.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would purchase up to $100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell, furthering a controversial 2006 partnership aimed at customers who run both Windows and Linux in their server environments.

In-flight Wi-Fi will eventually take off for passengers aboard some US airlines, but it won't happen before months of testing and slow rollouts of the wireless service.

Nearly three-quarters of US mobile phone users recently surveyed don't want to ride an airplane with passengers talking on phones.

Web database vendors claim they aren't worried by Microsoft's just-announced SQL Server Data Services offering, saying their services are sufficiently established, different, and/or better than Redmond's to enable them to thrive when SSDS is released -- according to the current schedule, in the first half of next year.

While some companies are still struggling to keep employees from watching online YouTube videos in the office, others are turning to video technology to improve internal training and collaboration, and to expand external marketing programs.

In agreeing this week to pay US$1 billion for MySQL, Sun Microsystems said it hopes to make MySQL's open-source database more attractive to enterprise users. But Sun has a lot of work to do, according to some MySQL users.

Sun Microsystems' decision to buy MySQL AB, the company behind a popular and growing open-source database, for US$1 billion, could allow Sun to to expand MySQL's reach -- and give database giant Oracle something new to worry about. But more immediately, Sun's announcement addresses a problem facing the privately held MySQL, namely, its future.

IT managers face increasing pressure to keep operations running while being strapped for cash and short on staff. As the baby boom generation begins to retire, many IT managers anticipate losing veteran workers. Add to that the fact that fewer computer science and information systems graduates are entering the workforce. James Kritcher, vice president of IT at White Electronic Designs in the US, shared his thoughts on dealing with staff in the face of an inevitable talent shortage.

We've all worked with them at one time or another: people who are disruptive, abusive or otherwise demeaning or mean-spirited. In short, they're jerks. Incendiary co-workers are more than a workplace distraction, however. Indeed, a growing body of research is being conducted in the U.S. and Europe that examines the impact bullies have on productivity and financial performance. Thomas Hoffman spoke yesterday with Robert Sutton, the author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, which is scheduled to be published by Warner Business Books on Feb. 22, about his inspiration for the book and some of the lessons that managers can draw from it. Excerpts from that interview follow.

BEA Systems announced Wednesday that it has acquired business process management (BPM) software vendor Fuego in a deal valued at US$87.5 million.