Stories about: DOT.COMS

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said US dot-com job cuts exceeded 1,000 for the second month in a row.

"The mood here is grim," said W. Brian Arthur, Citibank professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank that specializes in emerging science. "Broadband is dead in the water, some say, and Peter Drucker thinks the information technology revolution is over."

Since WorldCom Inc.'s revelation last week of the largest accounting deception in corporate history, a snowball effect has kicked in, with company after company admitting to bookkeeping irregularities and management crises. The flood is unlikely to end soon: With a corporate earnings season beginning and increasing pressure from politicians and regulators, the next few months will be a prime time for further disclosures.

Legions of dot-coms have collapsed, companies across the U.S. are laying off workers, and the economy remains in a sinkhole. It's against that backdrop that some sanity appears to be returning to IT project management. Gone are the days of bottomless-pit project funding and caffeine-pumped software developers sequestered off-site and working around the clock to be first to market with a glitzy Web site.

The Enron mess sure seems to be opening up a lot of old wounds.

Cisco Systems Inc.'s new Carrier Systems Group, last week announced as the twelfth technology group of strategic importance to the company, is viewed as a determined effort by Cisco to increase its penetration into incumbent carriers.

It's been a tough year for 27-year-old Stephan Koledin. On June 7, 2001, he was laid off from his software development job at The Motley Fool Inc. in Alexandria, Va. Since then, it's been a roller-coaster ride of shotgun Web searches, sure things gone bad, freelance work and unintriguing prospects.

Normally, the sky's the limit when it comes to consulting opportunities in a bad labor market. Not this year. Merely surviving will be a challenge, and many will find themselves earning less or doing other things.

Online retailers filled virtual stockings across the nation, as shoppers flocked to the Net in the month leading up to Christmas.

The unrelenting momentum of the Internet as a tool for employing creative and cost-effective new ways of doing business will be the driving theme of next week's Internet World Fall 2001 trade show in New York.

In September, the Boston Stock Exchange appointed Mike Curran as its first CIO to handle an increasing number of technology projects focused on disaster recovery and customer services. Curran had already held a number of senior positions at Zurich Scudder Investments Inc., most recently as chief operating officer of its international business unit.