Editors' Choice 2006
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Excellent competition forced our editors to make some difficult decisions for the 2006 Editors&#39; Choice Awards for software, hardware and services.
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Each year, we publish oodles of images with our magazine stories. Here are 10 of our favorite illustrations from 2007.
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I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall at the meeting where it was decided Joe Cannon should be the new editor for the Deseret Morning News. I wish him the best and hope he has more success managing newspaper content than he had at Geneva Steel.
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The Associated Press just made news. It wants to stop making news. Good for the AP. Bad for the BCS. The news is out that the Associated Press has decided to not let its weekly football poll serve as part
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Also: Digital cameras are the hottest gift for 2004. [News.com Extra]
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TIME has just announced their person of the year 2004-- George W. Bush, our newly re-elected president. From the magazine: For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of
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By Larry Rulison, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.  Dec.
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Editors: Shlomo Reifman and Samantha N. Wong Researchers: Joshua Brandt, Fei Mei Chan,  Andrew T. Gillies, Soo Jeong, Edward Knudsen,  Artie Kwok, John Ray and Jody Yen Programmer: Carl Subick
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The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.  If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.  "cheesecake"
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Love del.icio.us or hate it? Last week, we asked readers to send in their picks and pans, and we got a ton of responses. Mike Calore sorted through the results and created a list of rankings, including some surprises. In Monkey Bites
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Â· Change of strategy after spokeswoman resignsÂ· Couple consult former News of the World editor
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Publisher reports another strong year.
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Global events, financial markets, your personal finances - The Wall Street Journal is the one source that tells you how all the pieces fit together. Subscribe now and get up to 8 free weeks!
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(245 sec.) A look at the big titles of 2006 and how Wii, PS3 are changing the game.
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A look ahead at issues and events likely to make headlines in the coming year.
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(InfoWorld) - It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. Thatâs probably why âyear in reviewâ stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal compunction among editors and readers alike. But what to make of 2006? Itâs a year in which some enterprises and IT firms made bold moves to set themselves on a new course, while others failed, in spectacular fashion, to learn the lessons of the past. For this penultimate Tech Watch, we review the year with the aid of some pithy quotes. âIf I knew then what I know now, Iâd have done things differently.â -- Patricia Dunn, former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Sometimes you come across a product or corporate initiative -- letâs take Sonyâs recent DRM spyware as an example -- that is so patently wrongheaded you canât imagine how it ever came to see the light of day. When you dig into the history of those decisions, you often find that they were made by people who were trying, earnestly, to solve a very specific problem without seeing how their âsolutionâ might affect the company as a whole. Thatâs what makes the scandal that led to the resignation of HP Chairman Patricia Dunn and the criminal charges against her, HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, and three outside investigators all the more exceptional. These were the folks at the top of the totem pole. The dispute arose over the handling of an investigation by HP to see which members of its board of directors leaked information, including arguments about the ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, to the press. Hurd and other board members, it seems, became distracted by a âplumbingâ expedition, as it was called in the Nixon White House, and contracted with a company to use âpretexting,â a controversial technique where investigators pretend to be the people being investigated in order to access private information. Despite intense media and legal scrutiny, though, the squabble has not fazed HP shareholders or customers. Under Mark Hurd, CEO and newly appointed chairman, the company is fulfilling the promise of the controversial HP-Compaq merger engineered by Fiorina: It has overtaken Dell as the leading PC maker and IBM as the biggest IT company. The spy scandal has broad implications, however. Congress is now considering federal laws against pretexting, and increased oversight of corporate governance is becoming a shareholder rallying cry. --Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service ââFree has to have a price?â Thatâs nonsense.â -- Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz After years of staving off open source proponents, Sun Microsystems in November 2006 bit the bullet and made Java available via open source, and doubled down on that by offering up Java to the GNU General Public License, ensuring that revisions to Java are submitted back to the community at large. Naturally, the move raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: Can Sunâs Java gurus adapt to the new paradigm and relinquish some degree of control? Looking at the evidence, it seems likely that Sun can. Java already has spawned a whole industryâs worth of open source projects such as the popular Spring Framework. Sunâs Solaris OS has thrived under open source. Inside Sun, however, not everyone shared Schwartzâs optimism. Graham Hamilton, a Sun Fellow for the Java team, departed the company over the momentous announcement, according to one insider. Outside Sun, IBM protested that it wanted Java placed under the jurisdiction of the Apache Software Foundation. Schwartzâs decision regarding Java will be remembered as a high point of 2006, and further proof that commercial vendors must find a way to ride, not fight the open source wave. -- Paul Krill âI am having personal difficulty looking veterans in the eye.â -- VA CISO Pedro Cadenas With mega blow-ups like the hack of CardSystems, many labeled 2005 the âYear of the Data Breach.â But that year seemed to extend, seamlessly, into 2006, as well. No incident epitomized the bumbling of sensitive data than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairsâ loss of a laptop containing personal data of more than 26 million vets. The device in question was stolen from the home of a VA analyst, and was later recovered. Stories like the VAâs were sadly common this year. Chevron, GE, AT&T, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo all reported losing customer or employee data. One of the common themes in many cases was that data was being carried around, unencrypted, on portable PCs stolen from or lost by employees of third-party companies. That troubling trend bears out in a study that Vontu and the Ponemon Institute conducted this year, which found that 81 percent of the 500 companies surveyed âreported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months.â --Ted Samson âI wouldnât be surprised to see SaaS services (at) $5 per month, per user.â -- Josh Greenbaum, EAConsult 2006 didnât quite make it as âThe Year of SaaS,â but it came darn close. Spurred by the success of firms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAS created SaaS CRM products with integration to their on-premises software as a differentiator. Even more important: SaaS providers, led by Salesforce, laid down a solid foundation on which to build new services in 2007 and beyond. Take, for example, AppExchange, an online market of sorts that Salesforce launched in October. AppExchange allows third-party providers to post their wares, and gives users the ability to pick and choose from applications and features that enhance the Salesforce.com software. AppExchange implies a recognition by Salesforce and, we can now assume, other SaaS providers that if enterprise-level companies are to adopt SaaS, then SaaS solutions canât be siloed. Integration of CRM with ERP, business intelligence and product lifecycle management are a must for the enterprise. -- Ephraim Schwartz âthe best season to visit Italyâ -- search query by Thelma Arnold, aka AOL user No. 4417749 Connect users to the world of information â¦ then betray their trust. Itâs not exactly the long-term strategy AOL had in mind, nor one to stay on top in todayâs Web 2.0-influenced Internet. Yet AOLâs infamous search data leak in August, which resulted in the ousting of CTO Maureen Govern, was just one headline head-scratcher involving the online giant this year. AOL, with its huge user base, has a track record of developing innovative new services to keep users loyal. That should have put the company at the forefront of the Web 2.0 wave that gave birth to sites such as FaceBook. But AOL, like other âold lineâ dot-coms Yahoo and Microsoft, proved too slow on the uptake, as firms with bigger visions and faster feet cherry-picked hot properties and left them standing on the sidelines. AOL hurt itself, too, with news reports of horror stories from customers who tried to cancel accounts, and a âbadwareâ label for AOL 9.0. By the time The New York Timesâ triangulated Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga., from the search record of AOL user No. 4417749, it was merely putting a face on AOLâs already eroding relationship with its expansive user base. By yearâs end, firms such as AOL and Yahoo were taking bolder steps to right their listing vessels: AOL dropped its subscription-services model and a quarter of its workforce, including CEO Jonathan Miller. Yahoo also shook up its boardroom, amid disappointing earnings and signs of discontent from senior management. Shortly before he lost his job, CEO Miller had observed in a keynote speech that âthe big companies will stay big companiesâ as the Internet evolves. Going into 2007, AOL isnât alone among big companies that are praying that adage rings true. -- Jason Snyder
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The best of our football coverage from the past year.