Stories about: Comcast

Meet the man who could be your company's de facto customer service representative - a man you have never met and certainly isn't on your payroll. Thor Muller is founder and CEO of Satisfaction Unlimited, which runs an online community where customers air complaints about companies like Comcast, Apple, United Airlines, Whole Foods, Washington Mutual, Snapfish and Expedia to fellow customers and to the Internet at large.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft a decade ago, yet his ghost still loomed large, in the form of a persistent effort to continually extend the reach of Microsoft into every nook and cranny possible. And that ghost inhabited a company increasingly focused inward on its own view of what users should want and do. Like Windows Vista and Windows 7 before it, Windows UT (Unlimited Technology) captured a smaller share of upgrades than its predecessor. Ditto with Office UT. Even though Microsoft paid attention to hardware resource requirements in UT and didn't wield the new software as a way to force users to buy new hardware as its last several versions had done, feature fatigue had set in. For most people, Office 2000 and Windows XP did the job they needed, and learning a new UI every few years was simply not in the cards for a user base that had long thought of technology not as a shiny toy to play with but instead as a tool that needed to get the job done and stay out of the way.

While WiMAX appears to be set for commercial deployment in some US markets by year-end, the technology itself has been plagued by various fits and starts.

The scenario is typical: The lights on the network management consoles are a soothing shade of green, but a top revenue-generating application is crawling. Business users have swamped the help desk with calls and trouble tickets. Everyone there is calling the network team to figure out the problem.

Cisco and four other major tech companies have banded together to form a WiMAX patent pool to give companies access to WiMAX patents at predictable costs.

Comcast announced this week that it will no longer target individual protocols for traffic shaping, and will instead slow Web traffic for individual users who consume a "disproportionate" amount of bandwidth.

Comcast scored a public relations coup in April when an executive responded within 20 minutes to complaints about a cable outage posted by a prominent blogger on a micro-blogging site.

Apple will rule the living room in five years, analysts said Thursday as they slapped down the Tarot cards to predict what the company would be up to in 2013.

Ten great free network management tools were recently showcased. Readers responded with some of their own favorites, so I'm going to take a look at those tools and report on their capabilities and usage from my perspective as an experienced network manager.

Money is tight. Performance is declining. Your servers are all nearly three years old and pretty soon, their high-priced maintenance contract is about to kick in. What do you do?

I think, therefore Icahn. Just when you thought the Yahoo-Microsoft deal was kaput, in steps everyone's least favorite uncle Carl Icahn to muck things up. In a letter to the Yahoo board, the curmudgeon billionaire scolded board members, then announced his intentions to buy US$2.5 billion of Yahoo stock and wage a proxy battle to unseat all 10 members. So after after he forces Yahoo to succumb to the advances of Microsoft, then what? Icahn cashes out, and we're left with this forced marriage from Hell. Nice. Advice to Jerry Yang: Just lay back and think of the stockholders.