On September 3, 1987, Allied Signal registered the allied.com domain name, making it 86th .com domain ever to be registered.

AlliedSignal was an American aerospace, automotive and engineering company created through the 1985 merger of Allied Corp. and Signal Companies. It subsequently purchased Honeywell for $15 billion in 1999, and thereafter adopted the Honeywell name and identity.

Company History:

AlliedSignal Inc., formed from the acquisition of Signal Companies, Inc. by Allied Corporation on August 6, 1985, is one of the largest industrial corporations in the world. The company provides a wide range of products for many industries, including aerospace and automotive parts, chemicals, fibers, plastics, and advanced materials. AlliedSignal has its roots in the chemical industry and has had experiences from its earliest days in acquiring and holding subsidiaries. It may be said that Allied-Signal, formerly Allied, was born large and has been gaining ground ever since.

Five Companies Merged to Form Allied in 1920

The outbreak of World War I convinced several executives in the fledgling American chemical industry that the United States should contest the German lead in this field. Among them were Dr. William H. Nichols, a respected chemist and president of General Chemical Company; Eugene Meyer, a publisher and financier; and Meyer’s protégé, Orlando F. Weber. Meyer’s efforts bore fruit on December 17, 1920, with the formation of the Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation, a merger of five companies which among them provided the new company with four basic ingredients of the chemical industry of the day: acids, alkalies, coal tar, and nitrogen. The acids were furnished by General Chemical, founded in 1899, whose president, Dr. Nichols, became Allied’s first chairman. The alkalies were contributed by the Solvay Process Company, founded in 1881, and, like General Chemical, the leading American company in its field at the time of the creation of Allied. The Barrett Company, founded in 1858, was by 1920 the largest manufacturer of coal tar products in the United States, while Semet-Solvay, founded in 1895, was a builder and operator of coke ovens, a byproduct of which is coal tar. The National Aniline & Chemical Company, founded in 1917, at first merely supplied aniline oil, a substance used in making dyes, but its head, Orlando F. Weber, became Nichols’s successor and moved the new company into the production of nitrogen.

Although it was Eugene Meyer’s financial genius that had created Allied, it was Weber’s personality and management style that influenced Allied’s methods of doing business for generations to come, for good and for ill. Orlando Franklin Weber was born on October 6, 1878, in Grafton, Wisconsin. His father was a secretary of the Federated Trades Council in Milwaukee and a socialist labor leader. The younger Weber, however, was drawn to private enterprise. He first opened a bicycle shop and then went into the automobile business, starting an agency in Chicago for the Pope-Toledo car in 1902. From Chicago he moved to Detroit and then to New York where he came to the attention of Meyer. Meyer put Weber in charge of the 1915 reorganization of Maxwell, an early automobile company whose name was to linger in the public mind long after the company folded, thanks to the jokes of Jack Benny. Weber followed Meyer into the War Finance Corporation during World War I and, as a result, became interested in the chemical industry. Since Weber’s National Aniline had come through the war in the best financial shape of the five companies that formed Allied, it was only natural that Meyer should turn to his young associate to run the new chemical company.

Weber, first as president then as chairman, appropriated funds for a large plant to be built at Hopewell, Virginia, to fix nitrogen from the air for the production of synthetic ammonia. Ammonia could be turned into nitric acid which, when combined with the soda ash made by the Solvay component of Allied, produces sodium nitrate, a substance with an agricultural use as fertilizer and a military use as an ingredient in explosives. By the end of the 1920s Allied was doing a thriving business making and selling basic chemicals to the rest of American industry.

Important as this achievement was, it was on the financial aspect of running the company that Orlando Weber’s personality left its most enduring mark. Weber was a mathematical genius who had a grasp of the most complicated and detailed economic theories and who could, when called upon, discuss them by the hour with no notes. He was also highly secretive, keeping vital information about the company locked up in his personal safe and sharing this information with as few people in company management as possible. He was regarded by many of those that knew him as an autocrat who refused to spend any more of his company’s money than absolutely necessary.

The beneficial consequences of this unusual collection of personality traits was that, since Weber was a strong believer in a large reserve of liquid assets, Allied was able to survive the Great Depression relatively unscathed. From 1921 through 1939 Allied had no funded debt, never borrowed from banks, and paid a dividend every year, including 1932, the worst year of the Depression. The harmful consequences of Weber’s eccentric personality were, first of all, a refusal by Allied to engage in basic research leading to new products. Weber justified this decision by maintaining that he did not want to compete with the companies that were Allied’s customers. This policy, however, left Allied with a shrinking share of the market after World War II when new chemical products were introduced. Secondly, Weber’s penchant for secrecy got him into trouble with his stockholders, to whom he refused to issue detailed reports, and eventually with the Securities and Exchange Commission which, in 1934, charged him with failing to provide enough information to allow government agencies to determine whether Allied was making or losing money. Weber justified his reticence by claiming that he needed to protect company secrets. Nevertheless, this secrecy, combined with his autocracy, resulted in the fact that the highest executives in the company were not conversant with the overall operation of the company when he retired in 1935. This gap in expertise was to plague Allied for the next 30 years.

Weber’s autocracy took many forms, some petty and others significant. During his tenure, and for several years thereafter, Allied executives were forbidden to have their pictures taken for the media, forbidden to allow their biographies to appear in Who’s Who in America, and forbidden to take part in meetings of trade associations. More significantly, lateral communication between executives within the company was made cumbersome. If, for example, the plant manager for ammonia wished to speak with the plant manager for soda ash, then each manager had to ask permission from their respective vice-presidents in order for the conversation to take place. The vice-presidents, in turn, would have to ask Weber. Weber himself could make this system work because he was the original guiding spirit of the company and consequently knew where each piece of the mosaic of company operations fit. When he left, however, Allied’s corporate bureaucracy remained in place without anyone of Weber’s talents to organize all the pieces.

Post-Weber Years Were Ones of Decline

Weber himself was the cause of this knowledge vacuum, as it were, at Allied. In order to keep Charles Nichols, son of the scholarly Dr. Nichols, and the Solvay family from taking control of the company, Weber put Allied in the hands of accountants. These accountants knew little of the chemical industry but were the next three chairmen of Allied: Henry Atherton, Fred Emmerich, and Glen B. Miller.

During their term of office, from 1935 to 1959, Allied made money–particularly during World War II–because basic chemicals were essential to the war effort, but its plants became obsolete. In 1935, under the chairmanship of Emmerich, Allied borrowed $200 million to modernize its plants. Emmerich found himself unable to update company policy, however, because division heads had acquired complete autonomy. No vice-president could make any decision without the concurrence of every other vice-president.

Glen B. Miller, Emmerich’s successor, created the jobs of research vice-president and marketing vice-president, positions that had not existed at Allied previously. The company continued to drift without any coherent company policy or long-term strategy, however, because of the advanced age of its management. Kirby H. Fisk, who had experience in insurance and finance, was put in charge in 1959 and arranged a merger with Union Texas Natural Gas in 1962. Fisk then died of a heart attack, and Allied’s board could not agree on a successor. A troika emerged: Chester M. Brown, who had a background in operations, became president and chief executive officer; Harry S. Ferguson, the accountants’ champion, became chief administrative officer and chairman of the executive committee; and Howard Marshall, head of Union Texas before the merger, continued to run the petroleum concern but now with a strong voice in Allied’s boardroom. Since there was no agreement as to who should be chairman of the board, the position was left vacant. Finally, Frederick Beebe, a member of Allied’s board representing the interests of Eugene Meyer (Weber’s mentor), set in motion the complicated legal machinery that reorganized the board of directors and brought in John T. Connor, a former Secretary of Commerce under Lyndon Johnson, to be president in 1967 and chairman of the board in 1969.

Recovery Began in Late 1960s

The accession of Connor marked the beginning of Allied’s recovery. Connor found that Allied showed earnings on paper during the terms of his predecessors by means of unorthodox accounting methods, all perfectly legal but masking the fact that Allied had slipped from first to sixth place in the American chemical industry. In the 12 years of his involvement with Allied, Connor improved the corporate staff by hiring his own people, appropriated larger expenditures for the company’s more profitable businesses, such as oil and gas, and moved the company away from its orientation on basic chemicals and toward intermediate and end products that utilize chemicals.

In May 1979 Edward L. Hennessy, Jr., arrived on the scene to further Allied’s recovery and turn it into Allied-Signal, a more dynamic and promising company than its predecessors. Whether by accident or design, Allied’s board chose as the new chairman of the board, president, and CEO a leader whose personality and abilities were similar to those traits of Orlando Weber’s that proved beneficial to the company. Like Weber, Hennessy was an expert at mathematics, careful with corporate assets, and decisive. Unlike Weber, however, Hennessy was direct and explicit rather than secretive (though at times somewhat brusque) and, more importantly, devoted to the research and development that Weber shunned.

After taking charge, Hennessy directed Allied to the forefront of scientific and technological advances, sometimes at the expense of the chemical business conducted by Allied at the time of its formation. In September 1979, for instance, Allied discontinued its operations in coke, coal, and paving materials, selling its paving materials business, its Detroit, Michigan, and Ashland, Kentucky, coke plants, and two coal mines. Hennessy followed the lead of Connor in this policy, who had sold off the Barrett Company in 1967. These moves were prudent, since more money could be made in other areas, but they so changed the nature of the company’s business that it became misleading to think of the modern Allied-Signal as primarily a chemical company.

Hennessy’s positive contributions were largely in the area of acquiring high-tech businesses: Eltra in 1979, Bendix in 1983 (as a result of that company’s ill-starred attempt to take over Martin Marietta), and Signal Companies, Inc., in 1985. Subsequently, Allied-Signal’s business was conducted in three segments: aerospace/electronics (later known as just aerospace), automotive, and engineered materials. In 1985 the aerospace/electronics segment accounted for 39 percent of Allied-Signal’s revenues, the automotive segment for 27 percent, and the engineered materials segment for 22 percent.

In 1985 Allied-Signal lost $279 million, the first loss in the company’s history. This loss was attributed by Hennessy to the establishment of The Henley Group, Inc., a company formed from all of Allied-Signal’s businesses outside the three business segments mentioned above, and to restructuring the bureaucracy of the company to a more modern configuration (all told, the company took $725 million in write-offs in 1985). In spite of this loss, sales in the aerospace/electronics segment rose 27 percent in 1985 and edged up one percent in the engineered materials segment. Sales in the automotive segment (components for brake systems, air and fuel filters, turbocharging equipment, and spark plugs) declined by four percent.

Hennessy remained Allied-Signal’s CEO until July 1991 (and was chairman until year-end 1991). Although he had streamlined the company considerably through numerous divestments, including the 1986 spinoff of Henley and the sale of 7 more subsidiaries in 1987 for a total of $1.8 billion, and had increased revenues to a peak of $12.34 billion in 1990, Hennessy did not&mdashcording to many observers–pay enough attention to the company’s profitability and allowed company debt to reach dangerously high levels. During the late 1980s and in 1990, Allied-Signal’s after-tax return on sales were only in the 3.7 to 4.4 percent range; in 1991 the company was hurt further by the recession and it posted a net loss of $273 million. Meanwhile, long-term debt as a percent of total capital ranged from 30.8 to 34.9 percent.

Bossidy Era (1992–) Brought Host of Transformations

Larry Bossidy, the person brought in to succeed Hennessy, moved boldly and ruthlessly to transform AlliedSignal in a few short years (the hyphen in the company name was dropped in 1993). Bossidy had spent 34 years at General Electric Co., moving to AlliedSignal after having ascended to the position of vice-chairman–number two to GE’s chairman, Jack F. Welch, Jr., a well-known slash-and-burn type manager.

Bossidy quickly initiated a housecleaning at AlliedSignal, most evident in the decline in the company workforce from 98,300 employees in 1991 to just 76,600 in 1996. Unprofitable business units were jettisoned; many of these were small, but a few were quite significant: the 1992 sale of the company’s remaining 39 percent stake in Union Texas Petroleum for $940 million in net proceeds; the April 1996 sale of its braking business to Robert Bosch GmbH for $1.5 billion; and the November 1997 sale of its safety restraints business to BREED Technologies, Inc. for $710 million in cash. Capital spending was slashed, and Bossidy worked to change the corporate culture into a less bureaucratic, more team-oriented one, with resulting annual increases in productivity of almost six percent. These and other streamlining moves resulted in an AlliedSignal that was more profitable–after-tax return on sales was 7.3 percent in 1996–and less burdened by debt, as long-term debt as a percent of total capital was cut to 22.2 percent by 1996.

Under Bossidy’s leadership, AlliedSignal also became much more selective with its acquisitions. Major acquisitions of note were limited to that of the $375 million purchase of the Lycoming Turbine Engine Division of Textron Inc. in 1994; the $245 million acquisition from Hoechst AG of a 95.8 percent interest in specialty chemicals manufacturer Riedel-de Haën AG in 1995; the estimated $400 million purchase of Prestone Products Corp., a maker of antifreeze and other auto-care products, in mid-1997; the June 1997 acquisition of Grimes Aerospace, a maker of aircraft lighting systems, from buyout firm Forstmann Little & Co.; and the October 1997 purchase of Astor Holdings Inc., a privately held maker of specialty waxes, adhesives, and sealants that fit well with AlliedSignal’s burgeoning specialty chemicals division. The increased acquisitions activity of 1997 seemed to indicate an attempt to leverage the company’s increasingly healthy state; in fact, the specialty chemical division alone set a goal in 1996 of doubling its $1 billion in annual revenue by 2000, with such acquisitions as Astor Holdings paving the way.

Continuous change continued to mark the Bossidy era as the company in October 1997 announced a restructuring whereby its three-sector structure was replaced by one consisting of the following 11 business units: Turbocharging Systems; Engines; Aerospace Equipment Systems; Electronics and Avionics Systems; Aerospace Marketing Sales & Service; Federal Manufacturing & Technologies; Automotive Products Group; Truck Brake Systems; Specialty Chemicals; Polymers; and Electronic Materials (the first six of these had comprised the Aerospace sector, the next two the Automotive sector, and the last three the Engineered Materials sector). This restructuring succeeded in eliminating a layer of management, and, in a press release, Bossidy said that each of the 11 business units “is a significant factor in its market and has global reach, world-class talent, and the critical mass to operate autonomously. Removing the sector layer will enable these businesses to make faster decisions and serve customers with greater speed, flexibility, and cost effectiveness.”

By the late 1990s, AlliedSignal–thanks largely to its bold leader–was the envy of much of the industrial world. The company’s great potential seemed to have finally been fulfilled. In the years to come, AlliedSignal was likely to continue to seek complementary acquisitions–increasingly outside the United States&mdash well as growing organically, in its quest to remain one of the top industrial corporations in the world.

Compaq pays $3.3 million for Alta Vista Web address

Digital Equipment Corp. played hard to get, but perhaps Compaq Computer Corp. will turn out to be a softer touch.

A published report says Houston-based Compaq has agreed to pay $3.3 million to a businessman who happened to name his company Alta Vista before that became the name of one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. Compaq picked up AltaVista when it acquired Digital Equipment Corp. earlier this year. A company spokesman declined to comment on the report other than to say it was still in negotiations over the altavista.com address. As of late Tuesday afternoon, the www.altavista.com Web site was still being operated by Alta Vista Technology Inc.

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Compaq agreed to pay Jack Marshall $3.3 million to effectively purchase rights to the Internet address, www.altavista.com.

It is believed to be one of the largest settlements ever in disputes of this kind. Also as part of the settlement, Alta Vista Technology said it will change its name to PhotoLoft.com.

Digital had been fighting for rights to the address for two years. Marshall, who founded Campbell Calif.-based Alta Vista Technology in 1994, had been the first to register his company name as an Internet address.

This later led to confusion as volumes of surfers looking for the search engine landed instead on the Web site of a small Silicon Valley startup specializing in online photography.

However, Reuters reported another source close to the dispute saying a deal had been effectively reached, short of crossing all the T’s in the paperwork. Although he declined to comment on the amount of the settlement, the source did say the $3.3 million quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle was “pretty correct.”

AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then, the domain has redirected to Yahoo!’s own search site

Origins

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the crawler and indexer, respectively. The name “AltaVista” was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.

At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.

As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC’s 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries every day. This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.  Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function. It also allowed the user to limit search results from a domain, reducing the likelihood of multiple results from the same source.

AltaVista’s site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista’s service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books. AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.

By using the data collected by the crawler, employees from AltaVista, together with others from IBM and Compaq, were the first to analyze the strength of connections within the budding World Wide Web in a seminal study in 2000.

Business transactions

In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq and in 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CEO Rod Schrock, AltaVista abandoned its streamlined search page, and focused on adding features such as shopping and free e-mail. In June 1998, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated (“ATI”) $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com – Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, had registered the name in 1994.

In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company. CMGI filed for an initial public offering for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but when the internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled. Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista’s portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search service began losing market share, especially to Google. After a series of layoffs and several management changes, AltaVista gradually shed its portal features and refocused on search. By 2002, AltaVista had improved the quality and freshness of its results and redesigned its user interface.

In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. In July 2003, Overture was taken over by Yahoo!.

In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the search engine would shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!. In May 2011, the shutdown commenced, and all results began to be returned on a Yahoo! page.

Free services

AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a web-based machine translation application that translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish and now redirects to Bing’s translation service. They also provided free email.

Shutdown

On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced that AltaVista would be closed on July 8, 2013. The decision to close AltaVista was announced on Yahoo!’s Tumblr page.

Since that day, visits to AltaVista’s home page are redirected to Yahoo!’s main page.

Just a couple of days ago, the folks at Amazon took it upon themselves to scoop up the domain name KindleScribe.com – this of course fueling speculation that the upcoming Kindle e-reader would at last be named. This and KindleScribes.com were registered on August 20 2011, and along with their last registration of a domain, KindleAir.com, all point toward a future tablet name OR some defensively purchased names just in case someone wanted to capitalize on the fact that Air, Scribe, and Wave are associated very closely at the moment with tablet computers.

What Amazon registered today was KindleWave.com, this further fueling notions of another new Amazon service if not a full blown device. What we’ve got here is a bunch of speculation of course, though a couple of indicators point toward simple legal defense instead of early purchasing for the sake of future naming. KindleScribe.com and KindleWave.com both recently expired and were released from their former owners: Scribe registered to a Los Angeles company, Wave registered to a Tennessee company.

The entire world, if I may be so bold, is hoping that the tablet we’re thinking about here, whatever it may end up being called, should look like the NoteSlate concept we saw earlier this year. Also note that the last time we spoke directly about the Amazon tablets, we heard that they’d be loss leaders for the group – cheap tablets ahoy!

To be fair, both the Kindle Scribe domain names and Kindle Wave domain names could be merely defensive registrations by the company. KindleScribe.com and KindleWave.com recently expired and Amazon picked them up after they were deleted. KindleScribe.com was registered to a Los Angeles company; KindleWave.com was registered by a Tennessee company.

Still, in this gadget and tablet crazed world, this certainly fuels speculation.

Amazon.com, Inc., often referred to as simply Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and market capitalization. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to sell DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Amazon Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, and Fire TV—and is the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS). Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics.

Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to certain other countries for some of its products. In 2016, Dutch and Polish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched.

In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization, and is, as of 2016 Q3, the fourth most valuable public company.

History

The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called his “regret minimization framework,” which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the Internet business boom during that time. In 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a business plan for what would eventually become Amazon.com.

Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as “Cadabra” on July 5, 1994. Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as “cadaver”. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless.com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary, and settled on “Amazon” because it was a place that was “exotic and different” just as he planned for his store to be; the Amazon river, he noted was by far the “biggest” river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest in the world. Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, “There’s nothing about our model that can’t be copied over time. But you know, McDonald’s got copied. And it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.” Additionally, a name beginning with “A” was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized.

Since June 19, 2000, Amazon’s logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile.

After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online. He narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products which included: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, due to the large worldwide demand for literature, the low price points for books, along with the huge number of titles available in print. Amazon was originally founded in Bezos’ garage in Bellevue, Washington.

The company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book (now called Ingram Content Group), along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon. Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram. In the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries. Within two months, Amazon’s sales were up to $20,000/week. While the largest brick and mortar bookstores and mail order catalogs might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could “carry” several times more, since it would have a practically unlimited virtual (not actual) warehouse: those of the actual product makers/suppliers.

Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington. In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on Amazon.com: Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. In October 1995, the company announced itself to the public. In 1996, it was reincorporated in Delaware. Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at a price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s).

Amazon’s initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This “slow” growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term. When the dot-com bubble burst at the start of the 21st century, destroying many e-companies in the process, Amazon survived and grew on past the bubble burst to become a huge player in online sales. It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This profit margin, though extremely modest, proved to skeptics that Bezos’ unconventional business model could succeed. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year, recognizing the company’s success in popularizing online shopping.

Barnes & Noble sued Amazon on May 12, 1997, alleging that Amazon’s claim to be “the world’s largest bookstore” was false. Barnes and Noble asserted, “[It] isn’t a bookstore at all. It’s a book broker.” The suit was later settled out of court, and Amazon continued to make the same claim. Walmart sued Amazon on October 16, 1998, alleging that Amazon had stolen Walmart’s trade secrets by hiring former Walmart executives. Although this suit was also settled out of court, it caused Amazon to implement internal restrictions and the reassignment of the former Walmart executives.

Amazon.com announced on October 11, 2016 that they are planning to build convenience stores and develop curbside pickup locations for food.

Website

The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008. Amazon attracts over 130 million customers to its US website per month by the start of 2016. The company has also invested heavily on a massive amount of server capacity for its website, especially to handle the excessive traffic during the December Christmas holiday season.

Results generated by Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.

In the World

Amazon’s localized storefronts, which differ in selection and prices, are differentiated by top-level domain and country code.

Amazon’s technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Information Management (IM) support Amazon’s business strategy. The core technology that keeps Amazon running is Linux-based. As of 2005, Amazon had the world’s three largest Linux databases, with capacities of 7.8 TB, 18.5 TB, and 24.7 TB. The central data warehouse of Amazon is made of 28 Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers with four CPUs per node running Oracle database software. Amazon’s technology architecture handles millions of back-end operations every day, as well as queries from more than half a million third-party sellers. With hundreds of thousands of people sending their credit card numbers to Amazon’s servers every day, security becomes a major concern. Amazon employs Netscape Secure Commerce Server using the Secure Socket Layer protocol which stores all credit card details in a separate database. The company also records data on customer buyer behavior which enables them to offer or recommend to an individual specific item, or bundles of items based upon preferences demonstrated through purchases or items visited.

On January 31, 2013 Amazon experienced an outage that lasted approximately 49 minutes, leaving its site inaccessible to some customers.

On May 5, 2014 Amazon unveiled a partnership with Twitter. Twitter users can link their accounts to an Amazon account and automatically add items to their shopping carts by responding to any tweet with an Amazon product link bearing the hashtag #AmazonCart. This allows customers to never leave their Twitter feed, and the product is waiting for them when they go to the Amazon website.

Multi-level sales strategy

Amazon employs a multi-level e-commerce strategy. Amazon started off by focusing on Business-to-Consumer relationships between itself and its customers, and Business-to-Business relationships between itself and its suppliers but it then moved to incorporate Customer-to-Business transactions as it realized the value of customer reviews as part of the product descriptions. It now also facilitates customer to customer with the provision of the Amazon marketplace which act as an intermediary to facilitate consumer to consumer transactions. The company lets almost anyone sell almost anything using its platform. In addition to an affiliate program that lets anybody post Amazon links and earn a commission on click-through sales, there is now a program which lets those affiliates build entire websites based on Amazon’s platform.

Some other large e-commerce sellers use Amazon to sell their products in addition to selling them through their own websites. The sales are processed through Amazon.com and end up at individual sellers for processing and order fulfillment and Amazon leases space for these retailers. Small sellers of used and new goods go to Amazon Marketplace to offer goods at a fixed price. Amazon also employs the use of drop shippers or meta sellers. These are members or entities that advertise goods on Amazon who order these goods direct from other competing websites but usually from other Amazon members. These meta sellers may have millions of products listed, have large transaction numbers and are grouped alongside other less prolific members giving them credibility as just someone who has been in business for a long time. Markup is anywhere from 50% to 100% and sometimes more, these sellers maintain that items are in stock when the opposite is true. As Amazon increases their dominance in the marketplace these drop shippers have become more and more commonplace in recent years.

On 2 February 2016, General Growth Properties’ CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, during a year-end conference call with investors, analysts and reporters mentioned that Amazon plans to roll out 300 to 400 bookstores around the country. This was an unconfirmed comment, however, due to the source, a media frenzy ensued. In November 2015, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore location. It is aptly named, Amazon Books and is located in University Village in Seattle. The store is 5,500 square feet and prices for all products match those on its website.

On November 17, 1986, Advanced Micro Devices Inc registered the adobe.com domain name, making it 42nd .com domain ever to be registered.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, United States, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While initially it manufactured its own processors, the company became fabless after GlobalFoundries was spun off in 2009. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and embedded systems applications. AMD is the second-largest supplier and only significant rival to Intel in the market for x86-based microprocessors. Since acquiring ATI in 2006, AMD and its competitor Nvidia have dominated the discrete graphics processor unit (GPU) market.

Company History:

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is one of the world leaders in the microprocessor industry, ranking second behind Intel Corporation. Although AMD’s roughly ten percent share of the overall market pales in comparison to Intel’s 80 percent, the Sunnyvale, California company is considered a fierce competitor. AMD is considered especially strong as a supplier to the low-end PC market, where it commands a nearly 60 percent share. Nonetheless, AMD’s future health seemed dependent on diversification beyond its traditional markets and products. In addition to microprocessors and integrated circuits, the company also produces flash memories, programmable logic devices, and products for networking and communications applications.

Finding Opportunity: 1969–74

In 1968 Jerry Sanders (who had previously worked for Intel founder Robert Noyce) left his position as director of worldwide marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor. By May 1969 he and seven others officially launched Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. The company was incorporated with $100,000 with the purpose of building semiconductors for the electronics industry.

Although the company was initially headquartered in the living room of one of the cofounders, John Carey, it soon moved to two rooms in the back of a rugcutting company in Santa Clara, California. By September of that year, AMD had raised the additional money it needed to begin manufacturing products and moved into its first permanent home, in Sunnyvale. In May 1970, AMD ended its first year with 53 employees and 18 products, but no sales.

The firm initially acted as an alternate source of chips, receiving products from other firms such as Fairchild and National Semiconductor and then redesigning them for greater speed and efficiency. Unlike other second-source companies, however, AMD was one of the first Silicon Valley firms to stress quality above all else, designing its chips to meet U.S. military specifications for semiconductors. At a time when the young computer industry was suffering from unreliable chips, this gave AMD an advantage. The firm began to cater to customers in the computer, telecommunications, and instrument industries who were growing quickly and who valued reliability highly enough to pay for it. AMD avoided producing chips for such inexpensive consumer items as calculators and watches, determining that these were only short-term markets.

Sanders, the driving force behind AMD, also began instituting price incentives, relying heavily on salesmanship to keep the company afloat. To do this, he kept the company decentralized, breaking it into several product profit centers. As a result, engineers and designers were more aware of the business implications of their work than were their counterparts.

A flamboyant leader who flaunted his love of materialism, Sanders used his personality to push his small company into the public eye, giving it a larger presence than its size merited. While attempting to motivate employees through the desire to be as rich as he was becoming, Sanders stressed respect for those low on the company’s totem pole. He threw extravagant Christmas parties for everyone in the company and one year held a raffle, awarding $12,000 a year for 20 years to the winning employee–and showed up with a camera crew to record the prize delivery. These practices contrasted markedly with those of AMD’s more conservative competitors, including Intel and National Semiconductor, and quickly gave the firm an aggressive reputation.

In September 1972 the company went public, selling 525,000 shares at $15 a share, bringing in $7.87 million. In January of the following year, the company’s first overseas manufacturing base, located in Penang, Malaysia, began volume production. By the end of AMD’s fifth year, there were nearly 1,500 employees making over 200 different products, many of them proprietary, and bringing in nearly $26.5 million in annual sales. To commemorate its five-year anniversary in May 1974, AMD began what was to become a renowned tradition, holding a gala party, this one a street fair attended by employees and their families, in which televisions, ten-speed bicycles, and barbecue grills were given away.

Defining the Future: 1974–79

AMD’s second five years gave the world a taste of the company’s most enduring trait, tenaciousness. Despite a dogged recession in 1974–75, when sales briefly slipped, the company grew during this period to $168 million, representing an average annual compound growth rate of over 60 percent. Part of the success of the period was due to the implementation of a 44-hour work week for the company’s staff. This was also a period of tremendous facilities expansion.

In 1975 the company received an infusion of cash ($30 million for 20 percent of its stock) from Siemens AG, a huge West German firm who wanted a foothold in the U.S. semiconductor market. In 1976 the company signed a cross-license agreement with Intel. Two years later the company formed a joint venture, called Advanced Micro Computers (AMC), with facilities in both Germany and the United States, to develop, produce, and market microcomputer products. The venture was dissolved a year later, in March 1979, and the company purchased the net assets of the domestic operations of AMC. Also in 1978, the company reached a major sales milestone of $100 million in annual revenue. In 1979 the company’s shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time under the ticker AMD; that same year, production began at AMD’s newly constructed Austin, Texas facility.

Finding Preeminence: 1980–83

The early 1980s were defined for AMD by two now famous corporate symbols. The first, called the “Age of Asparagus,” represented the company’s drive to increase the number of proprietary products offered to the marketplace. Like this lucrative crop, proprietary products take time to cultivate, but eventually bring excellent returns on the initial investment. The second symbol was a giant ocean wave. The “Catch the Wave” recruiting advertisements portrayed the company as an unstoppable force in the integrated circuit business. And unstoppable it was, at least for a time. AMD became a leader in R&D investment and by the end of fiscal 1981 the company had more than doubled its sales over 1979. Plants and facilities expanded with an emphasis on building in Texas. New production facilities were built in San Antonio, and more fab space was added to the Austin plant as well. AMD had quickly become a major contender in the world semiconductor marketplace. In 1981, AMD’s chips went into space aboard the space shuttle Columbia. The following year, AMD and Intel signed a technology exchange agreement centering on the iAPX86 family of microprocessors and peripherals. That same year, in a minor setback, a group of engineers left the company to found Cypress Semiconductor. In 1983, the company introduced INT.STD.1000, the highest quality standard in the industry, and incorporated AMD Singapore.

Weathering Hard Times: 1984–89

In 1984 the Austin facility added Building 2, and the company was listed in a new book entitled The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. The following year, AMD made the Fortune 500 list for the first time, and Fabs 14 and 15 began operation in Austin. AMD celebrated its 15th year with one of the best sales years in company history. In the months following AMD’s anniversary, employees received record-setting profit sharing checks and celebrated Christmas with musical groups Chicago in San Francisco and Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns in Texas.

By 1986, however, the tides of change had swept the industry. Japanese semiconductor makers came to dominate the memory markets–up until now a mainstay for AMD–and a fierce downturn had taken hold, limiting demand for chips in general. AMD, along with the rest of the semiconductor industry, began looking for new ways to compete in an increasingly difficult environment. In September 1986, Tony Holbrook was named president of the company; the following month, weakened by the long-running recession, AMD announced its first workforce restructure in over a decade. In April 1987, AMD initiated an arbitration action against Intel. Later that year, the company merged with Monolithic Memories, Inc., acquiring the latter’s common stock in exchange for over 19 million shares of its own, a trade valued at $425 million. By 1989 AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders was talking about transformation: changing the entire company to compete in new markets, a process which began in October 1988, with the groundbreaking on the Submicron Development Center.

Making the Transformation: 1989–94

Finding new ways to compete led to the concept of AMD’s “Spheres of Influence.” For the transforming AMD, those spheres were microprocessors compatible with IBM computers, networking and communication chips, programmable logic devices, and high-performance memories. In addition, the company’s long survival depended on developing submicron process technology that would fill its manufacturing needs into the next century. By its 25th anniversary, AMD had put to work every ounce of tenaciousness it had to achieve those goals, growing to be either number one or number two worldwide in every market it served, including the Microsoft Windows-compatible business. AMD became a preeminent supplier of flash, networking, telecommunications, and programmable logic chips as well.

In May 1989, the company established the office of the chief executive, consisting of the top three company executives. In March 1991, AMD introduced new versions of the Am386 microprocessor family, breaking the Intel monopoly. A mere seven months later, the company had shipped its millionth Am386. That year, Siemens sold off its interest in AMD. In February of the following year, the company’s five-year arbitration with Intel ended, with AMD awarded full rights to make and sell the entire Am386 family of microprocessors. Early in 1993, the first members of the Am486 microprocessor family were introduced, and AMD and Fujitsu established a joint venture to produce flash memories, a new technology in which memory chips retained information even after the power was turned off. In July the Austin facility broke ground on Fab 25. In January 1994, computer reseller Compaq Computer Corporation and AMD formed a long-term alliance under which Am486 microprocessors would power Compaq computers. A month later, AMD employees began moving into One AMD Place in Sunnyvale, the company’s new headquarters, and Digital Equipment Corporation became the foundry for Am486 microprocessors. In March 1994, a federal court jury confirmed AMD’s right to use Intel microcode in 287 math coprocessors, and the company celebrated its 25th anniversary with Rod Stewart in Sunnyvale and Bruce Hornsby in Austin.

From Transformation to Transcendence: 1994–97

In January 1996, the company purchased Milpitas, California-based NexGen, Inc., a smaller semiconductor manufacturer founded in 1989. For fiscal 1998, the company posted net sales of $2.54 billion, a 7.9 percent increase, but also recorded a painful net loss on income of $104 million. In mid-1999, Hillsboro, Oregon-based Lattice Semiconductor Corp. purchased AMD’s semiconductor manufacturing unit Vantis Corp. for $500 million in cash.

With Microsoft holding the software market in one fist, and Intel holding the microprocessor market in another, companies like National Semiconductor bowed out of the microprocessor manufacturing business in the late 1990s, refocusing their efforts instead on core competencies. Other companies, according to Kathleen Doler’s August 1999 editorial in Electronic Business, “lost money six out of … nine fiscal quarters.” Indeed, AMD reported a 1999 second quarter loss of $162 million. With “68 percent of its revenue [derived] from microprocessors and related products,” Doler said, it seemed only prudent that AMD would diversify into other products in order to stay alive in the 21st century.

BBN Technologies (originally Bolt, Beranek and Newman) is an American high-technology company which provides research and development services. BBN is based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It is a military contractor, primarily for DARPA, and also known for its 1978 acoustical analysis for the House Select Committee on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. BBN of the 1950s and 1960s has been referred to by two of its alumni as the “third university” of Cambridge, after MIT and Harvard.

Think.com (Thinking Machines Corporation)

In May 1985, Thinking Machines became the third company to register a .com domain name (think.com). It became profitable in 1989, thanks to its DARPA contracts. The following year, it booked $65 million (USD) in revenue, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. In 1991, DARPA reduced its purchases amid criticism it was unfairly subsidizing Thinking Machines at the expense of Cray, IBM, and in particular, NCUBE and MasPar. In 1990, seven years after its founding, Thinking Machines was the market leader in parallel supercomputers, with sales of about $65 million. Not only was the company profitable; it also, in the words of one IBM computer scientist, had cornered the market “on sex appeal in high-performance computing.” Several giants in the computer industry were seeking a merger or a partnership with the company. Wall Street was sniffing around for an initial public offering. Even Hollywood was interested. Steven Spielberg was so taken with Thinking Machines and its technology that he would soon cast the company’s gleaming black Connection Machine in the role of the supercomputer in the film Jurassic Park, even though the Michael Crichton novel to which the movie was otherwise faithful specified a Cray.

Mcc.com (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation)

July 11, 1985

MCC was one of the first companies to register a .com domain. Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (Microelectronics and Computer Consortium – MCC) was the first, and – at one time – one of the largest, computer industry research and development consortia in the United States. In late 1982, several major computer and semiconductor manufacturers in the United States banded together and founded MCC under the leadership of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, whose previous positions had been Director of the National Security Agency and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency as an American answer to Japan’s Fifth Generation Project, a large Japanese research project aimed at producing a new kind of computer by 1991. The Japanese had formed consortia as early as 1956.  Such formations were illegal in the United States until the 1984 Congressional passage of the “National Cooperative Research Act”  Many European and American computer companies saw this new Japanese initiative as an attempt to take full control of the world’s high-end computer market, and MCC was created, in part, as a defensive move against that threat. Several sites with relevant universities were considered including Atlanta, Georgia (Georgia Tech), the Research Triangle, N.C. (UNC), the Washington, D.C. area (George Mason), Stanford University and Austin, Texas (UT) which was the final selection.

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)

DEC was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet, with dec.com, registered in 1985, being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.  Digital Equipment Corporation, also known as DEC and using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. DEC was a leading vendor of computer systems, including computers, software, and peripherals. Their PDP and successor VAX products were the most successful of all minicomputers in terms of sales.

Initially focusing on the small end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer. Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DEC’s position in the industry. Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC’s VAX-11 series was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer, sometimes referred to as “superminis”. These systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, and its sales through the 1980s propelled the company into the second largest computer company in the industry. At its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the Massachusetts State Government. The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, and especially the introduction of powerful 32-bit systems in the 1990s, quickly eroded the value of DEC’s systems. DEC’s last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC processor architecture. DEC initially started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series, but also employed it in a range of high-performance workstations. Although the Alpha processor family met both of these goals, and, for most of its lifetime, was the fastest processor family on the market, extremely high asking prices were outsold by lower priced x86 chips from Intel and clones such as AMD.

DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. As of 2007 some of DEC’s product lines were still produced under the HP name.

Northrop.com ( Northrop Corporation)

In 1985, Northrop bought northrop.com, the sixth .com domain created.  Northrop Corporation was a leading United States aircraft manufacturer from its formation in 1939 until its merger with Grumman to form Northrop Grumman in 1994. The company is known for its development of the flying wing design, most successfully the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

Jack Northrop founded three companies using his name. The first was the Avion Corporation in 1927, which was absorbed in 1929 by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation as a subsidiary named “Northrop Aviation Corporation” (and later acquired by Boeing).

Absolute Poker was founded by Scott Tom. From early in the life of the site the owners were involved in large scale cheating on the site.

It was once one of the largest around. It was launched in 2003 and quickly attracted a large number of players. A subsequent cheating scandal combined with legal complications that arose from the site serving US players would ultimately lead to the demise of the site.

The story of how Absolute Poker got started isn’t entirely clear. The general consensus is that it started from a group of students at the University of Montana. During the late 1990s, a group of students at the University of Montana were bonding as fraternity brothers in Sigma Alpha Epilson. Included in this group were Scott Tom, Brent Beckley, Garin Gustafson, Pete Barovich, Shane Blackford, and Oscar Hilt Tatum IV. These were the young men who would go on to be involved in the creation Absolute Poker.

Scott Tom and Garin Gustafson were already keen poker players and it’s believed they were watching the fledgling online gambling industry develop with interest. Seeing what the early sites had to offer, they believed they could do better. Together with their friends they decided to create their own poker site, Absolute Poker. Their initial success was probably well beyond their wildest dreams as the site began to make serious money. Scott Tom is generally considered to have been the driving force behind the launch of Absolute Poker. Along with the others, he moved to the gambling friendly region of Costa Rica, and it was there that their new company was formed. According to a number of reports his father, Phil Tom, a portfolio manager by trade, provided some of the required financial backing. Scott, who was managing the company, and his friends are said to have lived a wild life of luxury as Absolute Poker was an initial success. It’s also believed that his plan was to take the company public and stage an Initial Price Offering. However, in 2006 the legal landscape for online poker was changing and allegedly these plans were shelved and Scott instead sold the company to Tokwiro Enterprises.

In 2007, Absolute Poker was hit by a cheating scandal. The poker playing community had begun to suspect that all was not right as the poker site and a number of amateur sleuths started to investigate what was going on. Eventually it was discovered that at least one account at the site was able to view the whole cards of other players, and this account had been used to cheat unsuspecting players out of millions of dollars. The unofficial investigations that had taken place managed to link this rogue account to Scott Tom. After a subsequent investigation by Absolute Poker it was announced that Tom had not been involved in the cheating, although the poker community remained skeptical. The site had previously put out a statement that Tom had not been working at the site for over a year, but it was discovered that he been involved in day to day operations during the cheating scandal.

Following a formal investigation by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, it was announced that Absolute Poker as a corporate entity wasn’t directly responsible for the cheating and had not benefited from it. No individuals were named as being specifically responsible for the cheating, although speculation continued that Scott Tom was behind it. There were also rumors that it was in fact a friend of his, A.J. Green.

During the cheating scandal Phil Tom defended his son in many interviews, claiming that his son was being unfairly accused. He also had to deny rumors that surfaced in 2008, suggesting that he had been indicted, along with his son, for his involvement in the cheating scandal. His son was actually indicted later, in 2011, on charges including bank fraud and money laundering. These charges were related to the operations of Absolute Poker in serving US players.

Scott Tom, to date, hasn’t answered these charges. He’s believed to currently reside in Anitigua, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation considers him “at large”.

In 2008 AbsolutePoker was merged with UltimateBet in an attempt to clean up the image of both companies after they were wrapped in a huge cheating scandal where they stone tens of millions of dollars from their players. AbsolutePoker has been represented by Mark Seif and Michael Mizrachi for several of the last few years. Seif has been implicated in the cheating scandals on the site.

2005–2007 cheating scandal

UltimateBet had a cheating scandal similar in nature to that of Absolute Poker. In May 2008, the company released a statement about the scandal, claiming that cheating had taken place from March 2006 to December 2007. However, in a later statement they confirmed that the cheating had begun at the start of 2005: We have also confirmed that the cheating dates back further than we initially believed. We can now confirm that the cheating began in January 2005, long before Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG acquired UltimateBet from the previous ownership.

The company claimed the cheating was perpetrated by employees of the former owners, Excapsa Software. According to the company, the fraudulent activity was traced to unauthorized software code that transferred hole-card information of other players to the perpetrators during play. UltimateBet stated it had removed the cheating software as of February 2008 and began issuing refunds to affected players. On September 29, 2008, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission stated it had found clear and convincing evidence to support a conclusion that between the approximate dates of May 2004 to January 2008, Russ Hamilton was the main person responsible for, and benefiting from, multiple cheating incidents at Ultimate Bet.

In 2010, the number of active domains reached 196 million.

OVER 196 MILLION DOMAIN NAMES REGISTERED

The second quarter of 2010 ended with in excess of 196 million domain names being currently registered. That works out to one for every 34 people on the planet.

Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief for September 2010 states there were 196.3 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains at the end of the period. This result represents an increase of more than 3 million domain names over the first quarter and 12.3 million over the past year.

The .com and .net top level domain extensions make up over 100 million registrations, growing by 7.9 million during the quarter.

Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) registrations reached 76.3 million domain names, just a slight increase quarter over quarter, but a 2.5 percent jump year over year. Russian Federation, Brazil, Poland, France and Australian domain names; all members of the top 20 ccTLD club, exceeded 20 percent year over year growth.

The largest TLDs in terms of base sizewere .com, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .cn, .info, .nl, .eu and .ru respectively.

The .com and .net domain registration renewal rate for the second quarter was 73.2 percent, up by just under 1% from the first quarter.

Verisign says its average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the period was a staggering 62.5 billion; over 723,000 requests a second. Compared to the same timeframe in 2009, the daily average grew 28 percent.

On November 17, 1986, Adobe Systems registered the adobe.com domain name, making it 42nd .com domain ever to be registered.

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American multinational computer software company. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States. Adobe has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent foray towards rich Internet application software development. It is best known for Photoshop, an image editing software, Adobe Reader, the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Adobe Creative Suite, as well as its successor Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe was founded in February 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution.

Company History:

The name of the company, Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the houses of both of the company’s founders. Adobe’s corporate logo features a stylized “A” and was designed by the wife of John Warnock, Marva Warnock, who is a graphic designer. Adobe Systems Inc. is a leading developer of desktop publishing software. Sales of three of the company’s software products–Photoshop, Illustrator, and PageMaker&mdashcount for about 50 percent of Adobe’s sales. Adobe also developed and distributes, free of charge, Acrobat Reader, which allows Internet users to view and print portable document format (PDF) files. The company has investments in about 20 technology companies and is involved in two venture capital partnerships. Adobe also sells print technology to original equipment manufacturers; the company’s PostScript page description language became the industry standard for the imaging and printing of electronic documents.

Sparking the Desktop Publishing Revolution in the 1980s

Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, both former employees of Xerox Corp.’s Research Center in Palo Alto, California. At Xerox, Warnock conducted interactive graphics research, while Geschke directed computer science and graphics research as the manager of the company’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory. In a 1989 interview with the San Jose Business Journal, Warnock recalled that he and Geschke were frustrated at Xerox ‘because of the difficulty in getting our products out of the research stage.’ Believing in the profitability of an independent venture, they left Xerox to establish their own business, which they named after a creek that ran by their homes in Los Altos, California.

Shortly after it was launched, Adobe introduced PostScript, a powerful computer language that essentially described to a printer or other output device the appearance of an electronic page, including the placement of characters, lines, or images. The introduction of PostScript proved integral to the desktop publishing revolution. With a personal computer and a laser printer equipped with PostScript, users could produce polished, professional-looking documents with high-quality graphics. An article in a 1989 issue of the Los Angeles Times stated that Adobe’s PostScript ‘made desktop publishing possible by enabling laser printers, typesetting equipment and other such devices to produce pages integrating text and graphics.’ Advertising agencies, in particular, soon found the new technology indispensable.

Realizing the wealth of potential uses for the PostScript language, Adobe marketed and licensed PostScript to manufacturers of computers, printers, imagesetters, and film recorders. In 1985, Apple Computer, Inc., maker of the MacIntosh computer, incorporated PostScript for its LaserWriter printer. Shortly thereafter, Apple invested in a 19 percent stake in Adobe, which had reported revenues of $1.7 million the year before. Adobe’s rapid growth led to an increase in staff from 27 in 1985 to 54 by 1986.

More than 5,000 PostScript applications were developed and made available for every operating system and hardware configuration. In 1986, Adobe signed an agreement to supply Texas Instruments Inc. with the software for two of its laser printers, producing the first PostScript-equipped printers made for use with IBM-compatible personal computers. In addition, PostScript soon became available for use with minicomputers and mainframes, and it remained the only page description language available for multiple-computer environments, such as corporate office networks. Independent software vendors marketed products that used PostScript to render images and text onto film, slides, and screens, for less money than traditional typesetting methods incurred. Used by corporations, professional publishers, and the U.S. government, PostScript rapidly became one of the most ubiquitous computer languages worldwide.

To supplement the PostScript language system, Adobe introduced a software technology known as Type 1, which provided digital type fonts that could be printed at any resolution. Vendors soon began developing different Type 1 typefaces until there were more than 15,000, including Japanese and Cyrillic character sets. By the end of 1986, Adobe reported sales of $16 million and income of $3.6 million. During this time, the company was taken public and began expanding its customer base to include IBM and Digital Equipment Corp.

The strategy of marketing and licensing technology to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Apple became the cornerstone of Adobe’s success. In 1986 Apple accounted for 80 percent of Adobe’s sales, and the other 20 percent was composed of retail sales, an area into which Adobe moved the following year.

In 1987 the company introduced the Adobe Illustrator, a design and illustration software program. Enabling users to create high-quality line drawings, the Illustrator became popular among graphic designers, desktop publishers, and technical illustrators. The company also released the Adobe Type Library, which contained a large selection of type fonts, many of which were original typefaces Adobe had created especially for the electronic medium. The Type Library eventually would become the most widely used collection in the industry.

As graphics became more widely used in business communications, Adobe was poised to offer new technologies. The company’s introduction of a new version of the Illustrator, designed for use with Microsoft’s Windows program, offered PC users an exciting array of graphics tools and helped pave the way for other PostScript language-based graphics packages. By 1988 many industries and universities had adopted the Illustrator standard. Moreover, the Type Library, with 300 typefaces, had become the world’s largest collection of typefaces for personal computers.

Having successfully marketed its technology to both Macintosh and IBM, Adobe tackled a new project–developing the Illustrator and the Type Library for the NeXT computer system. Once this was accomplished, the NeXT computer system became the first to implement a new Adobe technology, Display PostScript. This adaptation of the original PostScript was unique in that it communicated directly with the computer’s screen, rather than through the printer. Representing a breakthrough in the long struggle for what computer buffs called ‘WYSIWIG’ (What You See Is What You Get), Display PostScript ensured users that images on the screen would be replicated exactly on paper through the printer. Display PostScript also allowed users to manipulate graphics on the screen; rotating, scaling, and skewing could all be performed to suit the user’s needs. IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. soon followed NeXT’s lead, licensing Display PostScript for their desktop systems.

In 1988 more than 25 PostScript printers and typesetters were on the market and 20 computer corporations had signed PostScript licensing agreements with Adobe. The company’s revenues for 1988 were an impressive $83.5 million, representing a 112 percent increase over revenues of $39.3 million the year before. Moreover, net income for 1988 increased 137 percent, reaching $21 million. During this time, Apple Computer remained the company’s biggest customer, accounting for 33 percent of Adobe’s revenues. By the following year, Adobe’s staff had increased to 300. As one of the fastest-growing software developers, Adobe sought to maintain its position in the industry and foil any potential competitors. Toward this end, Adobe kept its typeface strategies confidential, while continuing to expand into new areas.

At the 1989 MacWorld Exposition in San Francisco, Adobe introduced two new applications. Adobe Streamline software permitted users to reproduce hardcopy graphics onscreen, converting bit-mapped images into high-quality PostScript artwork. The second product, Collectors Edition II, could be used to set patterns. Adobe eventually adapted these technologies for IBM and IBM-compatible computers that used the Windows program.

Next on Adobe’s agenda was international expansion. The company signed an agreement with Canon Inc. of Japan, under which Canon had full licensing rights to Adobe PostScript. The world’s leading manufacturer of laser printers, Canon could bring the PostScript technology to international and multinational customers. To enhance its Type Library, Adobe signed agreements that permitted several companies to develop downloadable typefaces based on Adobe’s proprietary technology.

Adobe ended the 1980s on a high note; revenues in 1989 were more than $121 million, and net income reached $33.7 million. That year, the company introduced Adobe Type Manager. This program used Adobe’s outline fonts to generate scalable characters on screen, giving users greater flexibility and better WYSIWYG. The Type Manager also represented an expansion of the Adobe Type Library to 420 typefaces.

Also during this time, Adobe announced that it had acquired all rights to a software program called PhotoShop, an image editing application. PhotoShop, designed especially for artists and desktop publishers, was slated for market in conjunction with the Apple Macintosh. Designed to work with type, line art, and other images, PhotoShop provided users with a complete toolbox for editing, creating, and manipulating images. Other unique PhotoShop features included color correction, retouching, and color separation capabilities.

Continued Growth in the Early 1990s

By the end of the decade, the incredible boom in the computer business was showing signs of subsiding. In a 1989 Los Angeles Times interview, Adobe’s president, John Warnock, suggested that ‘if you think you have a formula for success, you’d better figure out how to change it from year to year.’ Coming up with fresh formulas to ensure continued success was Adobe’s focus as the company entered the 1990s. One of its strategies involved developing software that could operate platform-independent, allowing documents to be worked on and sent over many different computers and networks. In other words, Adobe envisioned a world in which a document could be produced on an IBM PC, for example, and sent directly to a MacIntosh.

On the way to realizing that goal, Adobe continued to set the pace for technological developments in the industry. In 1990 Adobe received what was believed to be the first copyright registration for a typeface program. The ITC Garamond font program was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, a move that suggested that typeface programs could be considered creative works of authorship. By this time, the Adobe Type Library had burgeoned from the original 12 type families to 134. The down-loadable typefaces were available for both IBM and Macintosh personal computers. The Type Manager, Adobe’s scalable-font technology, was made available for IBM PCs, as well as UNIX, DOS, and OS/2 systems. Adobe launched PostScript Level 2, which enhanced the PostScript language with new features, such as improved forms handling, color support, and pattern manipulation, making PostScript a more practical and convenient language. One important feature of Level 2 was its use of data compression to reduced transmission times and save disk space by reducing the size of PostScript files on disk. Level 2 also boasted new screening and half-toning technology, better memory, and better printer support features, allowing users to specify color choices and receive those colors in their output.

Late in 1990, Adobe acquired BluePoint Technologies, a leading creator of chips for rendering type. Adobe also signed a new agreement with Apple Computer to work jointly on developing new products using Adobe’s PostScript software and Apple’s printer technology. Moreover, Adobe announced the creation of Adobe Illustrator for the NeXT system, providing NeXT users with the same powerful design and illustration tool used by owners of MacIntosh and IBM PCs. Adobe’s revenues continued to soar. In 1990 the company hit a new record of $168.7 million in revenues, with net income of $40 million. The following year, Adobe announced that it was developing a new type technology, multiple master typefaces, which would allow users to control the weight, width, visual scale, and style of a single typeface to produce endless variations. Furthering its strategy of providing numerous licensing agreements throughout the early 1990s, Adobe signed contracts with Lotus Development Corp., Eastman Kodak, Tektronix, Inc., and others. In addition to its updated version of PhotoShop, Adobe also was responsible for another breakthrough in printing technology with the development of the Adobe Type 1 Coprocessor. The new device could render text 25 times faster than the fastest existing printers.

The company celebrated another year of record earnings in 1991. Revenues increased 36 percent to $229.7 million, and income shot up 29 percent to $51.6 million. Founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock received the MacUser magazine’s John J. Anderson Distinguished Service Award, for ‘enduring achievement in the Macintosh industry.’ Adobe’s efforts to create a universal standard for viewing complex documents continued in 1992. That year, the company marked its tenth anniversary and branched out into new ventures. With Hayden, a division of Prentice Hall Computer Publishing, Adobe signed an agreement to create Adobe Press, a joint publishing venture for developing books about graphic arts, Adobe computer applications, and advanced technologies. During this time, competition in the industry intensified, and Adobe sought new ways to maintain its lead in the industry. Adobe Carousel was the company’s first foray into electronic transmission of newspapers, magazines, and other print media. Carousel would allow such materials to be displayed on screen complete with pictures, color, and multiple typefaces.

In June 1992, Adobe President and CEO Charles Geschke was kidnapped. Although he eventually was returned safely and began granting interviews two months after the incident, he refused to discuss details of the abduction. In an interview with the San Jose Business Journal, Geschke discussed Adobe’s plans for the future. Maintaining that the company was beginning ‘a long journey down a digital highway,’ Geschke revealed that its primary mission was to make text, pictures, video, and, perhaps, sound computer-readable. Toward that end, Adobe acquired OCR Systems, an optical character recognition company that turned scanned documents into manipulatable text. With the introduction of Adobe Premiere 3.0 for Macintosh in 1993, Adobe entered the fields of video and multimedia. The software enabled users to perform desktop video editing formerly achieved only with expensive equipment. Adobe Premiere featured nonlinear editing, graphics, and special effects. In 1993 Adobe realized its goal of enabling incompatible computer systems to communicate. Adobe Acrobat software was designed to turn computers into information distributors that would allow Mac users to view a document in its original form, with formatting and graphics intact, even if the document had been created on an IBM. Analysts hailed Acrobat as a tool that could facilitate electronic distribution of everything from interoffice memos to training manuals to magazines. Adobe’s revenues for the year rose to $313.4 million, up from $265.9 million in 1992, and net income was reported at $57 million.

Challenges and Diversification in the Mid to Late 1990s

Adobe solidified its position in the desktop publishing market in 1994 when it acquired Aldus, the maker of the industry-leading PageMaker desktop publishing software. Adobe and Aldus had worked in cooperation previously, and Adobe’s font software was used in PageMaker. Also that year Adobe introduced After Effects, a program geared toward multimedia and film production efforts. After Effects provided tools for producing two-dimensional animation, as well as special effects and motion compositing. Adobe reported revenues of $676 million for fiscal 1994, up from $580 million the previous year. In the mid-1990s Adobe continued to grow through acquisitions and worked to strengthen its position in the volatile software industry. The acquisition of Frame Technology Corporation, the developer of FrameMaker publishing software, proved to be an unfortunate purchase; after integrating Frame into the Adobe family of operations, Frame’s sales declined heavily. Industry observers attributed the drop to Adobe’s decision to get rid of Frame’s technical support division. Also in 1995 Adobe bought Ceneca Communications, which developed tools for creating Web pages. The following year Adobe made additional acquisitions, including Ares Software, for about $15.5 million, and the research and development efforts of Swell Software, for about $6 million. The research project, however, was discontinued soon after the purchase. Also in 1996 Adobe spun off its pre-press division to Luminous Corporation for about $43.6 million and moved its headquarters from Mountain View to downtown San Jose. The following year Adobe divested its investment in Netscape Communications Corporation and separately acquired three software companies, spending a total of about $8.5 million.

On the software front, Adobe released PhotoDeluxe and PageMill in 1996. PhotoDeluxe, the first of its category, allowed consumers to manipulate and edit photographs on their computers. PageMill included tools for easily creating Web pages. In 1997 Adobe released upgrades of PageMaker, Illustrator, and FrameMaker. These releases, coupled with increased demand for Photoshop, PhotoDeluxe, and Acrobat products, led to total revenues of $912 million for fiscal 1997, up from $787 million the previous year. In addition, the company’s balance of software revenues shifted from predominantly Macintosh-based software to Windows-based software. Not everything was rosy at Adobe headquarters, however, and 1998 proved to be the most grueling in the company’s history. In 1997 Hewlett-Packard chose to stop licensing PostScript from Adobe when it developed its own clone version of the software. By the following year Adobe was feeling the effects of Hewlett-Packard’s decision, and its licensing sales suffered. The decline in Macintosh software sales hurt Adobe as well, and competitors such as Microsoft Corporation took away precious market share. In addition, because of the economic recession in Asia, sales in Japan, one of Adobe’s stronger markets, fell about 40 percent. Adobe’s stock price fell as well, hitting a low that was less than half of its value. Industry observers noted that Adobe had not kept up with the pace of software introductions. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 1998, ‘In fast-moving industries, the quest for perfection can get in the way of cranking out good-enough products.’ Adobe’s methodical approach to developing software had hindered its growth and success. Adobe also had grown its work force too enthusiastically, anticipating demand that failed to materialize.

In August 1998, Adobe indicated that third-quarter revenues would not meet expectations. For the nine months ended August 28, 1998, sales reached $101 million, down from $179 million for the same period in 1997. The company also announced a major restructuring designed to streamline operations and increase profitability. The firm planned to eliminate about 12 percent of the work force, about 300 people, including several top executives, and to concentrate more heavily on corporations and businesses, which represented a wider and more profitable niche than Adobe’s traditional audience of designers and graphic artists. Just as Adobe announced its intentions, it received a hostile takeover bid from competitor Quark Inc., developer of the leading QuarkXPress professional publishing software. Adobe successfully fended off Quark’s attempt and embarked on its restructuring journey. Despite the company’s trials, CEO Warnock, for the most part, shrugged off Adobe’s financial problems. ‘I don’t think Adobe’s struggling,’ Warnock told Computer Reseller News. ‘We’re not a company that’s in a turnaround situation. What we are is a company that was letting expenses get out of line.’ The year 1999 proved to be busy for Adobe. Adobe sold off two noncore operations as part of its reorganization tactic–Adobe Enterprise Publishing Services, Inc., which offered services related to Adobe Acrobat products, and Image Club Graphics, which produced and marketed graphics products and typefaces. In addition, because Adobe wished to enhance its reputation as a provider of tools for Internet and Web applications, the company acquired GoLive Systems, which developed Web design software. Thanks in part to marketing efforts, an increasing number of consumers began to use existing Adobe products Photoshop and Illustrator to design Web pages. Adobe Acrobat, which had failed to catch on in the mid-1990s, was quickly becoming a ubiquitous presence on the Web in the late 1990s.

Adobe released a number of products in 1999, including a new version of Photoshop, GoLive, PressReady, ActiveShare, and InDesign. InDesign was Adobe’s first offering in the high-end professional publishing segment, a segment dominated by Quark products. Called by many ‘Quark Killer,’ InDesign quickly created the largest backlog ever experienced by Adobe for a new product. In September 1999 Adobe reported record revenues of $260.9 million for the third quarter. Profit reached $72 million, up greatly compared with a loss of $6.1 million for the third quarter of 1998. Adobe’s stock price more than tripled during the year. Bear, Stearns & Co. analyst Robert Fagin told the Wall Street Journal, ‘It’s staggering. … In the space of one year, the company has been able to put together a true turnaround.’

For the fiscal year ended December 3, 1999, Adobe reported revenues of more than $1 billion, the first time in the company’s history that sales exceeded $1 billion. In January 2000 Adobe was named one of the 100 best companies to work for in America by Fortune. The company had successfully carried out its restructuring efforts and appeared ready to tackle new challenges. As Adobe approached a new era, it planned to increase profitability and continue developing cutting-edge technological solutions for publishers, graphic and Web designers, and businesses. President and co-founder Charles Geschke, who announced plans to retire effective March 2000, stated in a prepared statement, ‘Adobe enters the new millennium in its strongest position ever–in terms of the strength of its management team, its leadership market position, and the quality of its products.’

.aero (derived from aeronautics) is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) used in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is the first sponsored top-level domain based on a single industrial theme. The aero domain is reserved for companies, organizations, associations, government agencies, and individuals in aerospace-related fields. It was created in 2002 and is operated by SITA. SITA created and operates the Dot Aero Council.

.aero was developed in response to the growing need of the community, and is designed to create a structured, open and constantly evolving Internet naming architecture which will help the aviation community to integrate systems and service, and streamline communications within the community and with its partners.

Two-letter codes under .aero are reserved for airlines according to the IATA Airline Designators. While three-letter codes were initially reserved for airports (IATA airport code), they were released for registration by the larger aviation and aerospace community on December 1, 2008.

The aero top-level domain was initially approved in 2001 for a 5-year term expiring December 17, 2006 as part of a proof-of-concept of new top-level domains. The agreement was extended in October 2006 for a six-month term until June 17, 2007, and continued to be renewed on a June–December six-month cycle through June 17, 2009. In 2009, SITA and ICANN completed a new 10-year sponsorship agreement for the operation of aero.

Intended use

Airlines, airports, and other parts of the air-travel industry

Actual use

Players in this industry seem to be using it, further usage just like .com, .info and other TLDs

Registration restrictions

Credentials of applicants are checked before registration is permitted, but then any domain can be registered

Structure

Some categories of users can register at the second level and others at the third level within appropriate second level names; some industry codes such as those of airports and airlines were automatically linked to appropriate sites even if unregistered.

On November 5, 1986, Alcoa Inc registered the alcoa.com domain name, making it 40th .com domain ever to be registered.

Alcoa Inc. (from Aluminum Company of America) is an American public company best known for its work with lightweight metals and advanced manufacturing techniques. The world’s third largest producer of aluminum, behind Chinalco and Rusal, the company has corporate headquarters in New York City. From its operational base in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the United States, Alcoa conducts operations in 30 countries. It is one of the world’s largest lightweight metal manufacturers of products made of aluminum, titanium and nickel. Alcoa’s products are used worldwide in aircraft, automobiles, commercial transportation, packaging, building and construction, oil and gas, defense, and industrial applications. Alcoa’s products include fastening systems for the Airbus A380 jet, sheets for Ford’s F-150 truck, and the first aluminum fan blade for Pratt & Whitney jet engines. Alcoa also supplies aerospace-grade aluminum produced in South Korea to Samsung Electronics for its Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S7 model line-up. Alcoa is a major producer of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum, and alumina combined, through its participation in all major aspects of the industry: technology, mining, refining, smelting, fabricating, and recycling. As of 2015, the company has $36.7 billion in assets and 60,000 employees.

Company History:

The largest aluminum manufacturer in the world, Alcoa Inc. produces aluminum and alumina for automotive, aerospace, commercial transportation, construction, packaging, and other markets. Active worldwide in all major elements of the industry, Alcoa’s operations include mining, refining, smelting, fabricating, recycling, and developing technology. In addition to its numerous industrial applications, Alcoa aluminum is used in beverage cans and such consumer products as Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil and Alcoa Wheels. In 2003 the company employed 127,000 people in 39 countries.

Company Origins: 1888

Alcoa was founded in 1888 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, under the name The Pittsburgh Reduction Company. Its founders were a coalition of entrepreneurs headed by Alfred Hunt, a metallurgist who had been working in the steel industry, and a young chemist named Charles Martin Hall. Pittsburgh Reduction’s sole property was a patented process for extracting aluminum from bauxite ore by electrolysis, which Hall had invented in the woodshed of his family house in 1886, just one year after his graduation from Oberlin College. Hall’s discovery had promised to make aluminum production economical for the first time in history. Later in 1886, Hall had taken his process to a smelting company in Cleveland, Ohio, but left in 1888 after it showed little interest. One of his associates there, who had also worked with Hunt at another company, introduced the two men, and Pittsburgh Reduction was started as a result of their meeting. Despite its relative abundance, few practical uses existed for aluminum because it was so expensive to extract. By 1893, however, Hall’s process allowed Pittsburgh Reduction to undercut its competitors with aluminum that had been produced at a lower price. The company then faced two challenges: to generate a larger market for aluminum by promoting new uses for the metal and to increase production so that it could cut costs even further through economies of scale. Efforts in the former area proved most successful in the manufacturing of cooking utensils, so much so that the company formed its own cookware subsidiary, Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company, in 1901. Aluminum Cooking Utensil adopted the Wear-Ever brand name. Pittsburgh Reduction also began the process of vertical integration, insuring itself against the day when Hall’s patent would expire and it would no longer have a monopoly on his process. In the mid-1890s, it began acquiring its own bauxite mines and power-generating facilities. This process continued after the death of Alfred Hunt, who had served as president since founding the company. In 1899 Hunt, an artillery captain in the Pennsylvania militia was sent to Puerto Rico with his battery during the Spanish-American War and succumbed to malaria there. He was succeeded by R.B. Mellon of the Mellon banking family, which had loaned the company much of its startup capital and controlled a substantial minority stake. The Mellons, however, had been content to let the engineers run the company. Arthur Vining Davis, a partner who had joined Pittsburgh Reduction only months after its founding, acted as president during this time, and the Mellons formally ceded power to him in 1910. In 1907 The Pittsburgh Reduction Company changed its name to Aluminum Company of America, but eventually went by the shortened form of Alcoa. In 1914 Davis became the company’s last surviving link to its early days when Charles Martin Hall died, leaving an estate worth some $45 million.

Post-World War I Expansion

Alcoa had virtually created the market for aluminum, and its only competition came from foreign producers, who were hindered by high tariffs. Alcoa also benefited from rising demand from the automobile industry; by 1915, 65 percent of all new aluminum went into automotive parts. The outbreak of World War I ended the threat from foreign producers, and Alcoa even became an exporter. Annual production rose from 109 million pounds to 152 million pounds between 1915 and 1918, with much of it going to Great Britain, France, and Italy. At home, the vast majority of Alcoa’s output was used for military applications. The export boom that the war had fostered made it seem natural that Alcoa should expand its overseas operations once hostilities ended. Throughout the 1920s, the company acquired factories, mines, and power-generating facilities in Western Europe, Scandinavia, and, most prominently, in Canada. Late in the decade, however, the difficulty of managing far-flung operations, combined with a rising tide of economic nationalism abroad, made Alcoa’s position overseas increasingly untenable. In 1928 it divested all of its foreign operations except its Dutch Guyana bauxite mines, spinning them off as Aluminum Limited, based in Montreal and headed by Edward Davis, A.V. Davis’s brother. Aluminum Limited was renamed Alcan Aluminum Limited in 1966. In 1929 Arthur Vining Davis retired as president and became chairman. He was succeeded by Roy Hunt, the son of Alfred Hunt. At home, the general economic boom carried Alcoa with it, but between 1929 and 1932, during the early years of the Great Depression, sales fell from $34.4 million to $11.1 million. Alcoa laid off half of its workforce in this time, slashed wages for those who remained, and cut back its research-and-development budget. Demand for aluminum did not recover until 1936. Even so, Alcoa’s market share remained unchallenged, as it was still the only aluminum smelter in the United States thanks to its technological lead and economies of scale–a position that had not gone unnoticed. Alcoa had been having antitrust run-ins with the Justice Department since 1911, but all of the blows had glanced off of it until U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings filed suit in 1937, charging monopolization and restraint of trade on Alcoa’s part. The trial lasted from 1938 to 1940 and was the largest proceeding in the history of U.S. law to that time. A district court ruling in 1942 found in favor of Alcoa, but the government appealed. In 1945 an appeals court sustained that appeal. In his decision, Judge Learned Hand ruled that although Alcoa had not intended to create its monopoly, the fact remained that it had a monopoly on the domestic aluminum market in violation of antitrust law and it would be in the nation’s best interest to break it up. Hand’s decision became a landmark in the history of judicial activism, although it did leave open the question of how Alcoa’s grip on aluminum was to be broken.

Meanwhile, of course, the United States had entered World War II. Demand for aluminum skyrocketed. Alcoa, however, proved to be unable to keep up with the increases in demand, disappointing the War Department. During the war the government financed new plants that were built and run by Alcoa, but also encouraged the development of other aluminum producers. As the tide of the war shifted in favor of the Allies in 1944, the U.S. government began deliberations on how to dispose of these plants, which would soon become surplus capacity. As a result, a solution to the problem of how to carry out Hand’s ruling became apparent. The Alcoa plants that the government had financed would be sold off to two new rivals: Reynolds Metals Company and Permanente Metals Corporation, owned by industrialist Henry Kaiser. Reynolds and Permanente were to buy the plants at cut-rate prices. In effect, this divestiture created an oligarchy where there had formerly been a monopoly. In 1950 a district court decree carved up the U.S. aluminum market between the three: Alcoa would get 50.9 percent of production capacity, Reynolds 30.9 percent, and Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation, as Permanente Metals was renamed, 18.2 percent.

Roy Hunt retired in 1951 and was succeeded by Irving Wilson. During the 1950s, Alcoa’s share of U.S. production capacity declined as it expanded more slowly than Reynolds and Kaiser. Faced with increased competition, Alcoa also found itself without any brand-name recognition on which to capitalize in the consumer products arena; Reynolds, by comparison, had established a name for itself quickly with its Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil. Nevertheless, booming demand for aluminum, the result of successful wartime experiments in using the metal to build military aircraft, helped compensate for decreased market share. Despite increased competition, Alcoa remained the industry’s largest member and its acknowledged price leader. Davis retired in 1957, ending his 69 years of service with Alcoa. He was succeeded by Wilson, and Frank Magee became president and CEO. Alcoa came out of the brief recession of 1957-58 by realizing that it would have to internationalize and diversify in order to ensure its future. In 1958 Alcoa joined with Lockheed and Japanese manufacturer Furukawa Electric Company to form Furalco, which would produce aluminum aircraft parts for Lockheed. Also that year, Alcoa became a player in what was then the largest takeover battle in British corporate history when it negotiated a friendly acquisition of a stake in struggling British Aluminum, Ltd. The acquisition was aborted, however. Alcoa had been approached by British Aluminum Chairman Lord Portal, Viscount of Hungerford, who had neglected to consult his major stockholders before closing the deal. Thus, when Reynolds and British manufacturer Tube Investments made a substantially sweeter bid, a bitter struggle ensued. Institutional investors sold their shares to the Reynolds and Tube venture and Alcoa lost out. The fight over British Aluminum became a sensation in Britain not only because of the sheer spectacle of foreign interests vying for control of a major domestic corporation, but also because hostile takeovers were considered a breach of etiquette in British finance. What came to be known as The Great Aluminum War split British investment banks between the old-line, established houses that backed Alcoa and Portal, and the upstart firms that supported Reynolds and Tube.

Undeterred by this setback, Alcoa went on to spread its mining operations into other parts of the world, reestablishing an international presence it had not had since it spun off Alcan. Back home, the company moved aggressively into producing finished aluminum products. In 1959 it acquired Rome Cable and Wire Company. The next year, it purchased Rea Magnet Wire Company and Cupples Products Company, a manufacturer of aluminum curtain walls and doors. Both Rome and Cupples eventually had to be divested, however, because of antitrust objections. When John Harper became president and CEO in 1963, Alcoa found its profit margins squeezed by increased competition, high overhead, and a generally low market price for aluminum. One of Harper’s solutions was to move more aggressively into manufacturing finished products, which provided higher returns than smelting. On his initiative, Alcoa began producing sheet metal for aluminum cans, which became more popular among beverage consumers in the 1960s after the invention of the pop-top, and aerospace parts. In 1966 the company posted a record profit, finally exceeding a mark it had set ten years before.

1970s: Recycling and Diversification

High labor costs, dramatically high-energy prices, unpredictable bauxite prices, a slower national economy, and new competitors trying to break up the aluminum oligarchy all conspired against Alcoa in the 1970s. Sales and other operating revenues grew from $1.8 billion to $4.6 billion between 1972 and 1982, but profits as a percentage of gross income remained below historical levels. High interest rates forced Alcoa to slow its expansion and concentrate on paying down existing debt. In 1972 the company also decided to sell its technology to other manufacturers on a large scale, something it had been loath to do in the past. W.H. Krome George succeeded John Harper as chairman and CEO in 1975, and Alcoa began to show new signs of life. In the late 1970s it seized upon recycling as an alternative to the high cost of smelting, although somewhat later than rival Reynolds. By 1979 Alcoa was reprocessing 110 million pounds of scrap aluminum. By 1985 that figure would rise to over 500 million pounds and recycling would account for 19 percent of the company’s aluminum ingot capacity. George, who was more scientifically oriented than his predecessors, also led Alcoa into expansive research into high-tech applications of aluminum. By the time George retired in 1983, he had started the company on the path once again to developing new high-strength alloys for use in the aerospace business. Other areas of research and development, often pursued as joint ventures with other companies, included alumina chemicals, satellite antennae, and computer memory discs. George’s successor, Charles Parry, took over in 1983, and was even more committed to diversifying Alcoa. His goal, he said, was that half of the company’s revenue should come from non-aluminum sources by 1995. Immediately, Alcoa began scouting around for companies to acquire, particularly in high-tech fields. At the same time, however, Parry’s vigor in attempting to reshape the company was not well received in all quarters. He was attempting to radically change corporate thinking in a short period of time even as he continued the layoffs and plant closures that George had begun in an effort to cut costs, and employee morale suffered. Many did not see how he could create new business worth between $7 billion and $9 billion from scratch in less than ten years. Although Alcoa made only minor acquisitions during Parry’s tenure, which ended in 1987, the directors became concerned that the deals that Parry proposed to make would not fit in well. Some worried that the risks involved were more appropriate to a young company just starting up, not a major corporation nearing its centennial. Even George became uncomfortable with his successor, and in 1986 he led the search for Parry’s replacement. Aware of his board’s discontent, Parry took an early retirement in 1987. He was replaced by Paul O’Neill, former president of International Paper Company and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget during the administration of President Gerald R. Ford. O’Neill’s appointment was largely George’s doing; the two had met because of the latter’s directorship at International Paper.

Cost-Cutting and Strategic Acquisitions in the 1990s

Under O’Neill, the first outsider ever to run Alcoa, the company slowed its diversification and refocused on its core aluminum business. In 1990 it formed a joint venture with Japanese manufacturer Kobe Steel, Ltd. to make sheet metal for aluminum cans and parts for automakers for the Asian market. O’Neill had also sought to revitalize employee morale and ensure product quality by emphasizing safety as a primary concern, and by instituting a profit sharing plan. Combined profits for 1988 and 1989 more than doubled Alcoa’s total for the first eight years of the decade, providing an early sign that the changes instituted by O’Neill were working. By 1991, the revitalization of the aluminum business under O’Neill’s watch had achieved great strides. A billion-dollar program to modernize its plants was finished that year, long-term debt had been whittled down, and the company’s research and development budget had been increased significantly. Important changes in the structure of Alcoa also were underway during the early 1990s, as O’Neill pursued his agenda of “reinventing” the venerable aluminum giant. Two layers of corporate management were stripped away, including the company’s presidential post, exposing 24 business units that were ceded autonomous control over their respective operations. Each of these business units reported directly to O’Neill, who exerted considerable sway over the company’s operations despite his desire to give the business units an unprecedented amount of power. However, two developments outside Alcoa’s control affected the early years of the 1990s, hampering the company’s progress under O’Neill’s decisive rule. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a disastrous effect on the world aluminum market, causing prices to fall to the lowest in history. The Soviets exported an average of 250,000 metric tons of aluminum a year before the Berlin Wall came down, but when revolution swept communism aside and left Russia in a precarious financial position, aluminum shipments exported from the former Soviet Union increased exponentially. In dire need of cash, Russia was shipping an average of 1.2 million metric tons of aluminum per year during the early 1990s, flooding the market and drastically reducing the price of aluminum. Aluminum, which sold for $1.65 a pound in 1988, was priced at $.53 a pound by 1993, the lowest price ever recorded.

To make matters worse, a worldwide recession settled in during the early 1990s as aluminum prices plummeted. The effects of the recession had a more lasting hold on Alcoa’s fortunes than the fall of the Soviet empire. The company trimmed its payroll by 2,000 in 1992, the first major layoff since 1986, as depressing financial totals were tallied at the company’s headquarters. Alcoa lost $1.1 billion in 1992 and recorded a paltry $4.8 million gain in 1993. Despite the bad news, O’Neill remained steadfast to his revitalization plan and focused his attention on reducing the company’s healthcare costs, which were rising by 11 percent a year and costing the company nearly $200 million annually. “Our productivity improvements,” he declared, “are effectively being eaten up by health care costs.” By the mid-1990s, O’Neill’s reputation for running a tight and efficient enterprise had helped Alcoa realize a marked recovery from the ills of the early 1990s. Alcoa’s net income rose from $4.8 million in 1993 to $375.2 million in 1994 and up to $790.5 million in 1995, while annual sales increased from $9 billion to $12.5 billion. As the company charted its course for the late 1990s and the new century ahead, O’Neill continued to hold a tight rein on spending, vowing to cut $300 million from Alcoa’s annual sales and administrative costs by the end of 1997, which would produce a savings of 25 percent.

Toward this end, O’Neill spent $150 million in 1995 to upgrade Alcoa’s computer technology system to a customized, state-of-the-art network. By linking Alcoa’s businesses across the globe and facilitating the fluid transfer of information and ideas between operations, the system promised to increase the efficiency of bookkeeping, production and delivery cycles, and other corporate functions. Another key initiative of O’Neill’s restructuring vision was to move the company from its 1952 headquarters to a new, $40 million facility on the Allegheny riverfront. Vital to the new corporate headquarters was the emphasis on open space and the leveling of hierarchy as a way of fostering employee interaction and productivity. As Martin Powell, one of the principal architects on the project told the New York Times, “It is a design driven by function, not status. People will be more visible and more accessible.” O’Neill himself even went so far as to give up his own executive office in favor of a common cubicle. The move was complete by 1998. Ultimately, O’Neill aimed to increase Alcoa’s revenues from $13 billion to $20 billion by the new millennium. But in 1997 the price of aluminum remained depressed, and demand, particularly in the United States, continued to falter. As beverage companies sought to increase their profit margins by packaging drinks in eye-catching and unconventional plastic bottles, the long-held primacy of aluminum can packaging, which had accounted for 20 percent of all aluminum sales in North America and whose efficiencies were unrivaled, began to erode. To reach his ambitious revenue target by the year 2000, O’Neill would have to pursue aggressive strategies to continue cutting costs and increasing market share. One such strategy was to drive up demand for aluminum in the auto industry. This was a challenging objective, as steel was generally a much less expensive material for manufacturing cars, and as auto manufacturers had already invested heavily in equipment designed to handle steel. Still, with fuel efficiency standards on the rise, there was reason to believe that lighter weight aluminum would gain appeal. Alcoa had begun in the early 1990s to court car companies including Audi and Chrysler to cooperate in aluminum car projects. While all-aluminum cars remained a thing of the future, Alcoa nonetheless made incremental strides to penetrate the industry. In 1995, for example, anticipating increased foreign demand for its lightweight, forged aluminum bus and truck wheels, the company announced plans to invest $30 million to begin manufacturing the wheels in Europe. In addition to wheels automakers were amenable to the use of aluminum in transmissions, doors, and roof racks.

To better position itself to take advantage of these areas of demand, in 1998 Alcoa spent $2.8 billion to purchase Atlanta-based Alumax, then a leader in the business of aluminum extrusion for the automobile and construction industries. The acquisition put Alcoa first in the extrusion business, expanding its overseas exposure, especially in emerging markets in China and India. This was seen as an important step toward insulating Alcoa from the cyclical nature of the raw aluminum market. Indeed, an aggressive course of international acquisitions–including significant deals in Australia, Italy, and Spain–became increasingly important to Alcoa’s growth strategy for the 1990s. The biggest move, however, came in 1999, when Alcoa secured a $4.8 billion deal to take over the Reynolds Metals Company, shortly after the consolidation of three of its biggest rivals, Alcan Aluminum of Canada, Pechiney of France, and Alusuisse Lonza Group of Switzerland. While companies were powerless to control the price of aluminum, they could maximize their profit-per-pound of metal sold by merging various operations and excising overlapping expenses. Although Alcoa’s 1997 bid to buy certain assets from Reynolds was terminated after the Justice Department cited antitrust concerns, the 1999 deal won regulatory approval because of the complementary nature of the two businesses. Fulfilling O’Neill’s lofty goal, the merger brought Alcoa’s projected earnings for 2000 to $24 billion and enabled the company to retain its position as the world’s number one aluminum producer. The merger was completed in 2000.

New Leadership for a New Century

In 1999, O’Neill’s protégé, Alain J.P. Belda, succeeded him as CEO. Announcing his own, even loftier goal of growing the company–now officially renamed Alcoa Inc.–to a $40 billion concern by 2004, Belda continued to pursue a bold course of strategic acquisitions and cost-cutting. In 2000, Belda angled to secure Alcoa’s stake in the aerospace industry with the $2.9 billion purchase of Cordant Technologies, a leading supplier of aluminum airplane parts and solid-fuel rockets. The following year, the company reached a further agreement to complete the purchase of Howmet International, Cordant’s biggest business and the number one manufacturer of jet engine castings. Belda projected a combined cost savings of $425 million from the Reynolds and Cordant deals. Still, in spite of Alcoa’s shrewd strategic gains, the company remained vulnerable to the metals market, which continued to founder, and in January 2002, Alcoa posted its first quarterly loss since 1994. Later that year Alcoa announced plans to realign its businesses to better focus on the aerospace, automotive, and commercial transportation markets. By early in 2003, with sales still flat, the scope of the restructuring initiatives included the dismissal of 8,000 employees worldwide and the divestiture of the company’s underperforming assets, especially in Europe and South America. Belda remained steadfast in his belief that these initiatives would afford the company increased flexibility to focus on and profit from its core businesses.

Global internet giant Alibaba has lost a domain name dispute for the domain Alibaba.info because of insufficient evidence that the domain was registered in bad faith. One member of the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre panel dissented.

The majority of the panel took issue with Alibaba’s evidence that the domain name was registered in bad faith. Alibaba presented evidence that the domain name was used in bad faith but the evidence dated from several years after the domain was registered in 2004. The company also claimed that it was well known at the time the domain was registered but it only provided evidence of its international reputation from the preset year. The majority of the panel said this evidence is not enough to prove that Alibaba’s reputation in 2004 was big enough that the domain registrant “must have been aware” of the company when registering the domain.

The panel also found it troubling that Alibaba took so long to go after the .info domain name. After all, Alibaba registered the domain name Alipay.info four days after Alibaba.info was registered:

It must be assumed from this fact that the Complainant knew of the registration of disputed domain name at that time, but waited for more than 6 years to file the present Complaint case, apparently unconcerned that another party had used its name in a domain name and, in effect, encouraging the Respondent to continue to believe it was entitled to register the disputed domain name and to keep the registration.

1990 By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came toa close. New network service providers including PSINet, Alternet, CERFNet, ANS CO+RE, and many others were offering network access to commercial customers.NSFNET was no longer the de facto backbone and exchange point for Internet. The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAEs), and later Network Access Points (NAPs) were becoming the primary interconnections between many networks. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on April30, 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the service ended. NSF provided initial support for the NAPs and interim support to help the regional research and education networks transition to commercial ISPs. NSF also sponsored the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) which continued to provide support for the super computing centers and research and education in the United States. 1990 x.25 By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure. Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use.Telenet offered its Telemail electronic mail service, which was also targeted to enterprise use rather than the general email system of the ARPANET.The first public dial-in networks used asynchronous TTY terminal protocols to reach a concentrator operated in the public network. Some networks, such as CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the terminal sessions into their packet-switched backbones, while others, suchas Tymnet, used proprietary protocols.

During the growth of the Internet, it became desirable to create additional generic top-level domains. As of October 2009,there are 21 generic top-level domains and 250 two-letter country-codetop-level domains. In addition, the ARPA domain serves technical purposes inthe infrastructure of the Domain Name System.

On December 11, 1986, 3com Corporation registered the 3com.com domain name, making it 49th .com domain ever to be registered.

3Com Corporation was a digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw and recruited Bill Krause from Hewlett-Packard to be its president in February 1981 when it raised its first round of venture capital. Metcalfe has explained that he came up with the name 3Com as a contraction of “Computer Communication Compatibility”, with its focus on deploying the Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers. 3Com provided network interface controllers and switches, routers, wireless access points and controllers, IP voice systems, and intrusion prevention systems. The company was based in Santa Clara, Calif., USA. From its 2007 acquisition of 100 percent ownership of H3C Technologies Co., Limited (H3C) —initially a joint venture with China-based Huawei Technologies—3Com achieved a leading market presence in China, and a significant networking market share in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 3Com products were sold under the brands 3Com, H3C, and TippingPoint.

Company History:

3Com Corporation is the world’s number two provider of computer networking products, systems, and services, trailing only Cisco Systems, Inc. A pioneering networking company, particularly in the area of Ethernet network adapters, 3Com offers products and services for local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and the Internet. The company also is aggressively targeting emerging areas for future growth, including home networks, wireless products, broadband cable, digital subscriber line (DSL) services, and Internet telephony. Some of its key product areas include switches, network hubs (central switching devices for network communication lines), internetworking routers (devices that automatically select the most effective routes for data being transmitted between networks), remote access systems, network management software, network interface cards, and modems. 3Com also owns about 95 percent of Palm, Inc., the number one maker of handheld computer devices, which 3Com planned to completely spin off to shareholders in late 2000.

Ethernet Origins

3Com Corporation was founded in 1979 by Robert M. Metcalfe as a consulting firm for computer network technology. The name 3Com was derived from its focus on computers, communication, and compatibility. Bob Metcalfe, an M.I.T.-educated engineer, originally established the firm as a consultancy because the market for computer network products had not yet emerged. Six years earlier at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Metcalfe had led a team that invented Ethernet, one of the first local area network (LAN) systems for linking computers and peripherals (printers, scanners, modems, etc.) within a building. In 1979, after attending an M.I.T. alumni seminar on starting one’s own business, the 32-year-old Metcalfe quit Xerox to start his own consulting firm. Later that year, he incorporated 3Com, with the participation of college friend Howard Charney, an engineer turned patent attorney, and two others as cofounders.

In 1980, the group of four decided the time was ripe to convert their company into a LAN equipment manufacturing business using the Ethernet technology. It was at this time, following Metcalfe’s encouragement, that Xerox had decided to share its Ethernet patent with minicomputer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation and microprocessor manufacturer Intel Corporation to establish Ethernet as a LAN industry standard. As a manufacturer, 3Com was still a little ahead of its time; although there were very few enterprises that had multiple computers, most having only one mainframe or at most a couple of minicomputers, Metcalfe foresaw that personal computers would someday become commonplace.

The group began approaching California venture capital firms in October 1980 for financing to begin developing products. 3Com’s business plan emphasized a strategy of letting market demand determine its rate of growth, taking the risk that the market might run away, and focusing on long-term growth, rather than short-term market share. Despite the initial slow growth predictions, three venture capitalists contributed a total of $1.1 million in the first round of financing, in large part on the strength of its founders’ reputations.

In March 1981, Metcalfe recruited L. William Krause, who then was general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s General Systems Division, to become 3Com’s president. Metcalfe retained the positions of chief executive officer and chairperson and assumed the additional title of vice-president of engineering. Bill Krause also was given a nine percent share in the company, second in size only to Metcalfe’s 21 percent. 3Com then had only nine employees, but Krause had visions of a much larger company. Also that month, 3Com began shipping its first hardware product, its first Ethernet transceiver and adapter. Krause soon hired a vice-president of sales and a vice-president of marketing, and, a few months later, he hired someone else to assume Metcalfe’s position of vice-president of engineering. Krause had a conservative, risk-averse management style. When sales of 3Com’s interim product were not as high as expected in the summer of 1981 and a cash flow problem loomed, Krause initiated a survival plan that involved a hiring freeze, a pay cut for all employees and officers, and a specific list of objectives. Even so, 3Com was not in serious difficulty. Sales for the year ending May 31, 1982 were $1.8 million. A second round of financing totaling $2.1 million came in January 1982. At the June 1982 board meeting, the board compelled Metcalfe to relinquish his title of CEO to Krause, who had really been in charge since he came to 3Com. Metcalfe then took on a new, more active role in the position of vice-president of sales and marketing.

3Com’s sales took off in the summer months of 1982, not long after IBM introduced its 16-bit personal computer. The young company became profitable in 1983, and, in March 1984, 3Com went public, raising $10 million. By then it was expanding by approximately 300 percent annually, having grown from $4.7 million to $16.7 million in sales for the fiscal year ending May 1984. Earnings that year were $2.3 million, and the company had a 15 percent operating profit. Two years later, for the fiscal year ending May 31, 1986, revenues reached $64 million.

The company was doing well selling adapter cards to value-added resellers and to original equipment manufacturers, which were large computer manufacturing companies. The market was rapidly maturing, however, as computer manufacturers, including IBM and Digital Equipment, were beginning to integrate their own networking functions into their computers. In 1986, 3Com held eight percent of the LAN market, while computer manufacturer IBM had captured 28 percent of the market by including LAN hardware and software within its computers.

Mid-to-Late 1980s: Providing More Complete Computer Network Systems

In response to the trend, 3Com decided to move in the direction of providing more complete computer network systems. In 1984, Metcalfe had started a new software division to develop advanced network software, and the company shipped its first network operating system software, 3+, two years later. Also during this time, 3Com began marketing its own computer called the 3Server to function as a network server, a computer on a network whose data is accessed by multiple desktop computers in a configuration known as client-server. By the spring of 1986, servers accounted for 32 percent of 3Com’s sales. To complete the system, 3Com also wanted to offer computers that functioned as clients. Therefore, in early 1986, it pursued a merger with Convergent Technologies Inc., which manufactured UNIX-based workstations. Two days before the scheduled shareholder approval in March 1986, however, 3Com’s investment banker advised against being acquired by Convergent. On its own, 3Com then began selling systems that included modified personal computers, referred to as network stations, which operated only within its networks.

In 1987, 3Com began marketing itself more as a workgroups computing company that made and marketed PC-network systems. As such, it emphasized products that improved the productivity of workgroups. Several product introductions were made that year, including new network servers, software, and industry-standard network adapter cards. With this market strategy, however, 3Com was running into competition with Novell, Inc., which offered similar products. One important difference, however, was that 3Com targeted niche markets of more sophisticated users.

In September 1987, 3Com made a significant acquisition by purchasing Bridge Communications Inc. for $151 million. Bridge was a provider of internetwork gateways and multiple-protocol bridges, devices that link different networks together on a corporate level. Thus Bridge’s products complemented 3Com’s, and the largest independent networking manufacturer at that time was formed. Integration of the two companies, however, was not without difficulties. Bridge was completely merged into 3Com by March 1988, but it was not until the end of 1989 that its new internetworking products were introduced. Bridge cofounder William Carrico was appointed president of 3Com, with Krause remaining as CEO, but differences in management styles and corporate cultures prompted Carrico to resign in May 1988, and Krause regained the presidency. At the same time, Bridge Communications Division General Manager Judy Estrin, another cofounder of Bridge, also resigned. The integration of the sales forces also caused problems, since 3Com had focused on value-added resellers, whereas Bridge was more involved in direct sales. Therefore, a Cooperative Selling Program was launched whereby sales representatives earned commissions on sales to value-added resellers just as they did for direct sales. The buildup of a direct sales force, however, angered some of 3Com’s traditional dealers, and sales of LAN Manager suffered.

Also in 1987, 3Com had entered into a joint effort with Microsoft Corporation to develop and market LAN Manager network software for the OS-2 operating system. 3Com sold LAN Manager under a license agreement with Microsoft and, beginning in 1988, it also marketed 3+Open, its own version of LAN Manager. LAN Manager, however, was a direct competitor of Novell’s product, NetWare, and OS-2 eventually proved less popular an operating system than expected.

3Com’s sales for the year ending May 31, 1988 were $252 million, up from $156 million in the previous year, and earnings had risen from $16.2 million to $22.5 million. By 1988, 3Com was the leading company specializing in computer networks. As a provider of networks, it was second only to Digital Equipment and was ahead of IBM. Then, in the summer of 1989, revenue growth began to slow seriously for the first time, in part due to the poor sales of LAN Manager. 3Com had its first annual drop in earnings for the year ending May 1990. The company also was losing in its battle against rival Novell’s NetWare, which by 1990 had 65 percent of the network operating system market share. In 1989, 3Com shipped 14,000 copies of its 3+ and 3+Open software, whereas Novell shipped 181,000 copies of NetWare. Meanwhile, internetworking products, the specialty of the acquired Bridge Communications, were being neglected.

Early 1990s: Focusing on the Networks Themselves

Krause responded by implementing a ‘New Renaissance Plan’ beginning in January 1990 to reorganize and refocus the company. 3Com began marketing itself as a ‘network integrator’ and a ‘network systems supplier,’ as a single source for network hardware and applications software compatible with multiple vendors’ systems. Client/server networking was de-emphasized, and the focus shifted to comprehensive networking and internetwork connections. 3Com thus gave up going head to head against Novell, and 3Com’s hardware henceforth supported both LAN Manager and its former competitor, NetWare. The marketing of LAN Manager, meanwhile, was left to Microsoft.

Krause also centralized the company by reducing the number of divisions from five to three: product development, internal operations, and sales. New executive vice-presidents were named to head each division, replacing the authority of Metcalfe’s vice-presidency. Krause then removed himself from daily operations and began looking for someone else to replace him as CEO.

In April 1990, 3Com appointed Eric Benhamou, who had been the new executive vice-president of product development, as president and chief operating officer. Benhamou had been one of the cofounders of the acquired Bridge Communications company. A month later, founder Metcalfe resigned from his posts as vice-president of marketing and board member, after being passed over for the position of president. In August 1990, Krause himself resigned as CEO of 3Com, and Benhamou assumed that post as well. Krause remained only as chairman of the board, leaving management satisfied with his accomplishments in building 3Com into a significant company of 2,000 employees.

Benhamou continued the process of refocusing the company along the lines of Krause’s Renaissance plan. 3Com began investing more in technically innovative products such as network adapters, software, network management, and internetworking. Increasing emphasis was put on the cohesiveness of its products. To that end, in November 1990 two new divisions were created to replace four previous product-oriented groups. A Network Adapter Division was created to sell the company’s Ethernet cards, replacing the former Transmission Systems Division, and a Network Systems Division, headed directly by Benhamou, assumed the responsibilities of the former Enterprise Systems Division, Distributed Systems Division, and the Management, Messaging and Connectivity Division. Some mid-level managers were removed in the process.

In January 1991, 3Com further redefined its business objectives. The company completely gave up the network operating system software business, which had been providing the software packages LAN Manager, 3+, and 3+Open, since the LAN Manager royalty contract with Microsoft had become a financial burden. Under the contract, 3Com had to pay Microsoft royalties even if the computer servers it sold did not include LAN Manager but 3Com’s 3+Open instead. Moreover, when LAN Manager was sold independently, not bundled with 3Com hardware, 3Com still had to pay the expense of customer support for LAN Manager and thus was losing money. 3Com’s exit from the network operating system business freed the company from its royalty contract with Microsoft, and all marketing and support of LAN Manager was turned over to Microsoft. 3Com’s LAN operating system, which had been losing market share to Novell’s NetWare for the past three years, held only 14 percent of the market when the company dropped out. The restructuring also involved steering away from providing client and server computers in order to focus on the networks themselves. Benhamou’s redirection and reorganization of the company also involved putting two businesses up for sale. Communications Solutions Inc., a manufacturer of connectivity products beyond LANs that had been acquired in 1988, was sold to Attachmate Corporation. The workgroup business, that which sold servers and workstations, however, could not find a buyer and was gradually eliminated. Whereas workgroup-related hardware and software had contributed $113 million, almost one quarter of 3Com’s revenues, in 1990, this figure had dropped to 11 percent in 1991. The reorganization also involved laying off 234 employees, or 12 percent of the workforce, and a $67 million restructuring charge.

Thereafter, the company refocused on its successful LAN adapter line and internetworking products, such as bridges, hubs, adapters, and routers. 3Com had begun to depend increasingly on sales from its internetworking business, that of the acquired Bridge Communications company, after neglecting it for three years. 3Com had seen its market share in bridges and routers fall from 29 percent in 1988 to 19 percent in 1990, although it was still the third ranking company in the field, following Cisco Systems, Inc. and Vitalink Communications Corporation Network adapters, meanwhile, came to account for 72 percent of sales in the second half of 1991. 3Com further concentrated on improving its core adapter product line with the development of adapters for wireless notebook computers and adapters for higher speed network systems.

The initial results of the restructuring included lower revenues due to fewer product lines. For calendar year 1991, sales declined 15 percent to $370 million, and the company suffered a loss of $33 million, compared with a $24 million profit the previous year. Lower profits also were caused in part by the more competitive nature of the LAN adapter market that had emerged in the early 1990s. By the end of 1991, 14 percent of the company’s workforce had been laid off, leaving a total of 1,676 employees. By 1992, however, the company was back on track, with sales rebounding to $423.8 million for the fiscal year ending May 31, 1992 and earnings becoming positive at $7.96 million.

For its other LAN components, 3Com came to rely increasingly on licensing or acquiring third-party technology. The company bolstered its hub business by acquiring the Data Networks business of U.K.-based BICC PLC, one of Europe’s largest hub manufacturers, in January 1992. This gave 3Com the LinkBuilder ECS, an Ethernet chassis hub. In September 1992, 3Com introduced LinkBuilder 3GH, a high-end switching hub licensed from Synernetics Inc., a manufacturer of LAN switches. In a move to expand beyond Ethernet LAN structures, in 1993 3Com acquired Star-Tek Inc., which produced hubs for the Token-Ring network architecture. 3Com introduced a multifunction hub, LinkBuilder MSH, which could support both Ethernet and Token-Ring LANs in the spring of 1993. In December of that year, 3Com purchased wireless communications technology from Pacific Monolothics Inc. Early in 1994, 3Com acquired Synernetics, a manufacturer of LAN switches, and Centrum Communications Inc., which provided products for remote network access. In September 1994, 3Com purchased ATM innovator NiceCom Ltd., a subsidiary of Nice Systems based in Tel Aviv, Israel. 3Com rounded out its acquisitions spree in late 1995 with the $775 million purchase of Chipcom Corporation, a maker of multifunction high-speed switches for large computer networks. This acquisition not only gave 3Com its first presence in the large corporate systems segment, it also propelled 3Com into second place among the world’s networking companies, behind only Cisco Systems. 3Com’s product strategy and acquisitions under Benhamou helped the company reach $2.33 billion in sales for the fiscal year ending in May 1996, nearly six times that of four years prior. Reflecting its rising stature, while at the same time representing an attempt to make the company better known to the general public, 3Com paid $3.9 million to the city of San Francisco to change the name of Candlestick Park, where the Giants played major league baseball, to 3Com Park, a move that angered many baseball fans.

Late 1990s: U.S. Robotics and Palm

Despite its diversification efforts, 3Com remained primarily a maker of network adapters in the mid-1990s, a period in which the emergence of the Internet heightened demand for networking products of all sorts. While market leader Cisco Systems concentrated mainly on the devices that formed the backbone of the Internet, 3Com focused on the Internet edge with its products that connected personal computers to networks–both LANs and WANs and to the Internet, and those that welded together local area networks. 3Com’s key acquisition in its emerging Internet strategy was that of U.S. Robotics Corporation, which was completed in June 1997. Dallas-based U.S. Robotics was the leading maker of low-cost modems, which were used to connect personal computers to the Internet and to other remote networks. The company also had a leading presence on the other end of the modem, that is in the remote access devices that were the entry points into Internet service providers and corporate networks for users dialing in through a modem. U.S. Robotics was particularly strong in the area of corporate remote access devices. In 1995 the company also had acquired Palm Computing, a pioneer in the field of handheld computing devices.

Following the acquisition of U.S. Robotics, 3Com derived more than half of its revenues from the low end of the networking segment, that which included network adapters and modems. Overall revenues reached $5.42 billion for the 1998 fiscal year but the company was barely profitable thanks to merger-related and other charges totaling $253.7 million. Integrating U.S. Robotics into 3Com proved more difficult than anticipated, in part because of the geographic and cultural divide between Silicon Valley and Texas oil country. An inventory backlog also developed for U.S. Robotics modems for a time while an industry standard was being adopted for another increase in analog modem speed, this time to 56 kilobits per second. In fact, with faster alternative access technologies–such as cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL)–being developed, many analysts were predicting the demise of the analog modem and questioned the wisdom of the U.S. Robotics acquisition. Although the analog modem proved longer lasting than anticipated, and new access technologies were slow to be adopted, 3Com was forced to contend with a number of shareholder lawsuits stemming from the U.S. Robotics purchase and the company’s plummeting market value.

For the 1999 fiscal year, 3Com posted net income of $403.9 million on sales of $5.77 billion, representing a vast improvement in profitability but only a slight revenue gain. The company was suffering from intense competition and sagging prices, particularly in its core network adapters and modems segment, where revenues were actually on the decline. The brightest spot was Palm Computers, which had captured 70 percent of the handheld computer market. But by late 1999 3Com management had concluded that Palm had become a distraction away from the company’s networking core. 3Com, therefore, announced that it would spin off Palm during 2000. In early March of that year 3Com sold about five percent of the common stock of the newly named Palm, Inc. in an initial public offering that raised $874 million–an IPO conducted in the midst of a technology stock frenzy on Wall Street. 3Com next planned to distribute the remaining Palm stake to 3Com shareholders later in 2000.

As the 21st century began, speculation continued that 3Com would itself become an acquisition target or would be broken up through further spinoffs. But Benhamou was insisting that the company would remain independent and had the right mix of networking products. 3Com was counting on being a key player in such emerging areas as home networks, wireless products, broadband cable, DSL services, and Internet telephony. To facilitate this, the company was forging alliances, such as a partnership with Microsoft to develop home networking products. In addition, 3Com continued to make strategic acquisitions, such as the March 1999 $87.8 million purchase of NBX Corporation, a company specializing in Internet telephony systems that integrated voice and data communications over small business LANs and WANs.