Suddenly apologetic following its failure to 'fess up to its shaky performance during last month's market roller coaster, Etrade is sucking up to its customers just a little bit.
In a letter dated 3 November, which is just hitting customers' mailboxes, Etrade president and CEO Christos Cotsakos tells the online brokerage's clients that he feels their pain.
"At Etrade we were as frustrated as our customers, particularly since our entire team had worked around the clock working for you...." he said in the letter, referring to the would-be traders who could not log in to the over-crowded service. The company is "substantially increasing" the money spent to expand and improve its online trading system, from US$50 million a year - although it won't disclose by how much.
- - -
GTE buys Genuity to play Hopscotch: In a move designed to garner more business Web-hosting customers, GTE Internetworking announced today that it will beef up its network by acquiring distributed applications hosting company Genuity Inc. from Bechtel Enterprises.
GTE is betting that Genuity's Hopscotch load-balancing technology will solve the problems of busy servers, network congestion, and latency for GTE's 1,000 Web-hosting customers. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although the acquisition, being handled by the GTE Internetworking affiliate and backbone-provider BBN Corp., is expected to be completed by year's end.
"We are combining our high-speed national backbone with global reach, robust public and private peering relationships, advanced hosting, and distributed application management, with our security and systems integration expertise to enable customers to migrate mission-critical applications and business processes to the network," said George H. Conrades, president of GTE Internetworking, a subsidiary of GTE Corp. (13.Nov.97)
- - -
You're not paranoid ...: All that talk about Microsoft sizing up the top five US cable companies like so many piggybanks capable of taking its spare change and turning the industry into another MS outlet isn't exactly music to the ears of Rupert Murdoch. The News Corp. chairman, who sits at the controls of much of the world's media and cable access, is, in fact, nervously feeling the Microsoftian pinch, AP reports.
"Everybody in the communications industry is paranoid of Microsoft, including me," Murdoch told reporters following an annual shareholders meeting of British Sky Broadcasting in London. News Corp., a mega-player in the cable industry, owns a 40 percent stake in BSkyB, as well as almost an alphabet's worth of other satellite broadcasting services around the world, the Fox TV networks, former 20th Century Fox movies, and more.
But Murdoch is apparently worried that Bill Gates could gain an even tighter grip on the cable market and will force the industry to adopt the likes of WebTV and Windows CE as it moves to make Net access over cable the norm. (12.Nov.97)
- - -
Bombay or bust: In a flanking maneuver on the front lines of the PC-vs.-NC war, Oracle has challenged the government of India to promote the network computer.
Oracle and its subsidiary Network Computer Inc. have proposed a national think-tank made up of academia, industry, and the government to bring India, which is already teeming with software engineers, into the advanced computer age.
Microsoft, Oracle's arch-rival, has also been going after India, which has been emerging as one of the most important software countries, initially as a backshop for Western companies, and increasingly as a market for finished computer goods. (12.Nov.97)
Reuters contributed to this report.
