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Even assuming PeopleSoft fends off his offer, Ellison may yet have the last laugh. This is the era of consolidation in computerland. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and USA Interactive have spent billions of dollars snapping up smaller competitors. Others, like Palm and Handspring, have tried to stave off the hungry advances of these giants by merging. Now it's the turn of Ellison's realm, the complex world of business software, to go through some serious cyclical slimming. The outcome will be crucial to owners of widely held tech stocks and people who use their products, which includes just...
...billion in annual revenues, and its net income increased 31% in the most recent quarter. But Ellison also faces a whole range of challenges. His biggest asset is Oracle's Database software: 70% of all packaged business applications worldwide run on it, making it as hard to ignore as Microsoft Windows. Even Oracle's biggest rival, German giant SAP, chooses to use Oracle Database over its IBM and Microsoft-made counterparts. Oracle Database is a huge part of that virtual plumbing system known as back-office software, which helps keep track of payroll, makes sure products leave warehouses on time...
...provides system-wide filters that are smart enough to intercept a fair percentage of incoming junk mail before it lands in your In box. The junk is deposited into a separate folder from which you can retrieve messages that shouldn't have been blocked. True to its geeky heritage, Microsoft provides tools for custom filtering that offer users more flexibility than AOL's mail controls, though AOL is busy playing catch...
...ROLL YOUR OWN All the major e-mail programs (Microsoft's Outlook, Apple's Mail, Qualcomm's Eudora) provide software tools for building personalized junk-mail filters. The Mail program that comes with Apple's OS X is probably the best. It learns to separate the wheat from the e-chaff during a training session, and then lets you fine-tune the results with JUNK/NOT JUNK buttons. Like Outlook and Eudora, Mail also lets you write your own specific filtering rules, but that's a tedious and potentially endless exercise. Outlook users might be better off buying a third-party...
...More often than not, the data are worth more than that--especially to the 70% of DriveSavers customers that are corporations. The company has long-term contracts with the likes of AT&T, Apple and IBM. (Rival CBL Data Recovery Technologies, based in Toronto, has a similar deal with Microsoft.) The forensics lab at Deloitte & Touche uses DriveSavers for its most sensitive cases, such as the one last winter when a defendant in a court case who had been caught on security-camera footage threw the drive on which it was stored into an ice-covered lake. The drive...