Chris Nerney

Frustrated by a sluggish stock market and hungry for a financial windfall, Wall Street increasingly seems eager for another technology stock bubble. A recent slew of mega-mergers, tech IPOs (initial public offerings) and rumored tech IPOs have been grabbing headlines and stoking investor buzz. A small sample: eBay’s $2.6 billion acquisition this week of popular […]

I had to travel to New York City for Jupitermedia’s Digital Rights Management Strategies Conference last week, and decided to take an Amtrak train from my home near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., rather than fly out of Albany. When I was buying tickets at the train station the day before my departure, I asked a gentleman […]

I’ve written plenty of columns about eBay over the past five years, and I’m relieved to say that early on I saw the online auction giant would emerge as one of the few big winners in the Internet space. Otherwise, I wouldn’t provide links to these old eBay columns here, here and here. But I […]

IT professionals are exhibiting distinct signs of depression these days. And I know why. It’s my fault. Well, not just me. The dour, gloomy media is to blame. I know this because Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s head cheerleader, recently told a group of CNET editors that the media is needlessly bumming everybody out. “You guys like […]

Hailed only months ago as the long-awaited savior to discontented users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox open-source browser now is being subjected to the kind of scrutiny and criticism that inevitably confronts any challenge to the status quo. If you haven’t heard the latest, it turns out Firefox isn’t the impenetrable […]

Someone needs to tell Google investors that it’s not 1999. Or maybe it’d be better if we told the rest of the market that it is. Hey, why not spread that vintage Internet gold dust all over Wall Street? It sure could use some. The undisputed search leader reported stunning first-quarter results after Thursday’s trading […]

It was a bell-to-bell rout on Wall Street Friday as continued economic concerns and IBM’s disappointing earnings results fueled a selloff that left major U.S. stock indexes at their lowest point of the year. The Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P 500 started trading in the red and finished even redder, despite positive earnings news from […]

In the wake of the dot-com crash and numerous financial scandals that have rudely ushered in the new millennium, we’ve become accustomed to seeing corporate executives sentenced to prison. Martha Stewart, of course, just completed her stay in a federal facility, while former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers may soon trade pinstripes for a different kind […]

You IT professionals can stop worrying now. Your security woes will soon be a thing of the past. Normally I hesitate to express such unbridled optimism, but earlier this week the chairman of the World’s Most Important Software Company looked an auditorium full of IT security professionals in the eye and solemnly assured them that […]

I never thought I could ever get sick of the Internet. Any time of the day or night you can log on from the comfort of your home and read news, facts and opinion from around the world, on every conceivable topic. Indeed, for an information junkie like me, the Internet has been like the […]

Stocks shook off a sluggish performance Wednesday to rally in the final hour of trading as Sprint’s acquisition of rival Nextel fueled investor confidence. The late-day surge helped the major indexes pull out of the red in the wake of a new spike in oil prices and a further descent by the dollar. The Dow […]

Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan’s comments about the massive U.S. current-account deficit caused the ailing dollar to slide further and stocks to fall in Friday’s trading. The Dow Jones finished the day at 10457, a drop of 116 points, or 1.1 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 34 points, or 1.6 percent, to 2071, while the […]