Communications of the ACM
Breaking Up a Digital Monopoly
How to decompose a vertically integrated digital monopoly to enable competitive services based on a shared data structure.
From ACM Opinion
Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later
Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University...
From Communications of the ACM
Face the Inevitable, Embrace Parallelism
Hardware, software, and applications must all evolve in anticipation of the proliferation of parallelism.
From Communications of the ACM
Computing: The Fourth Great Domain of Science
Computing is as fundamental as the physical, life, and social sciences.
From ACM Opinion
How Wolfram Alpha Could Change Software
The upstart "computational knowledge engine" claims its results are original works, raising important questions about software and intellectual property.
From Communications of the ACM
Viewpoint: Time For Computer Science to Grow Up
As the computer science field has evolved, so should the methods for disseminating computing research results.
From ACM Opinion
Bill Gates Offers the World a Physics Lesson
It's been a year since Bill Gates left full-time work at Microsoft, but he's found plenty to keep him busy. In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria,Microsoft...
From ACM Opinion
Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better
For the last 15 years, Microsoft's master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it." The list of commercial hits/Microsoft...
From Communications of the ACM
Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?
A frequent question I hear about Communications, and about ACM publishing in general, involves its access model. I am asked: "Why don't you adopt the open-access...
From ACM Opinion
Google and the Evolution of Search: What's Next in Search? Much, Much Better Search
For many years, Google, on its Explanation of Our Search Results page, claimed that "a site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by...
From ACM Opinion
Google and the Evolution of Search: Cheating the System
In the second of three interviews with members of the Google team responsible for overseeing search algorithms at the company, Google software engineer Matt Cutts...
From ACM Opinion
Google and the Evolution of Search: Human Evaluators
Google has acknowledged that its search results are no longer solely and automatically determined by the company's vaunted algorithms. Indeed, sources say the company...
From ACM Opinion
Flaws in Web's Much-Touted Wolframalpha
When a free Web service called WolframAlpha launches in the coming days, the public will get to try a "computational knowledge engine" that has had technology insiders...
From ACM Opinion
An Interview with Jon Kleinberg
Jon Kleinberg tallied a long list of awards and achievements before being named recipient of the 2008 ACM – Infosys Foundation Award in the Computer Sciences at...
From ACM Opinion
Enterprise Search Needs Better Metadata
Today's workers are used to "Googling" queries and getting results quickly and accurately. However, while searching at work, these same workers often find it difficult...
From Communications of the ACM
The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Software as a Service
The commercial opportunities of software as a service are widely hyped these days and many think SaaS is the future of software. That might be true in the medium...
From Communications of the ACM
The Dot-Org Difference
One of the first things you'll notice about the new Communications Web site (cacm.acm.org) is that it has different...
From Communications of the ACM
Why Ebay Lost to Taobao in China: The Glocal Advantage
How Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) electronic-commerce platforms in China compete and how buyers are stimulated to be both aware and trustful of sellers through buyer...
From Communications of the ACM
Communications Preps Web-Enhanced Articles
The soon to launch Communications Web site will break the bounds of the printed monthly.
From Communications of the ACM
How Are We Doing?
A rabbinical story tells about an angry reader who stormed into a newspaper office waving the day's paper, asking to see the editor of the obituary column.
From Communications of the ACM