Priceline Group has come a long way since 1998 when a serial inventor and entrepreneur named Jay Walker won a patent for buyer-driven pricing, setting the stage for the first online system that let consumers bid for plane tickets and later, hotel rooms. The company has morphed into the biggest global online travel agency based on revenue, with an especially strong presence in Europe, where it was early to recognize consumers’ fading resistance to
When Joe Tucci took over as EMC chief executive in January 2001, he faced the challenge of reviving a company that took a big hit in the 2000-01 dot-com crash, with annual revenue falling to $5.4 billion in 2002 from $8.8 billion just two years earlier. The data storage system-maker’s customers were shifting to client-server computing and shared, networked resources. Tucci knew software innovation would be key. EMC (EMC), based in Hopkinton,
“You’ve got mail!” The cheerful male voice was America Online’s ubiquitous greeting in the 1990s. It was so popular, it became the title of a 1998 movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In those pre-spam, pre-email blast days, it meant you were probably hearing from someone you knew. Today, the sound is gone, along with the hiss made by a 2400-baud modem as it connected to AOL’s service through one of thousands of phone lines across the country. But