Microsoft hit with new E.U. antitrust charges
Microsoft confirmed Friday that European Union regulators have filed preliminary charges against the company, charging it with breaking antitrust laws by including its Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system.
Rival browser maker Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian company, filed the December 2007 complaint that led to the EU's decision.
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"Yesterday Microsoft received a Statement of Objections from the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission ," Microsoft said in a statement it issued Friday afternoon. "The Statement of Objections expresses the Commission's preliminary view that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows since 1996 has violated European competition law."
Microsoft said it is "committed to conducting our business in full compliance with European law," and said it would respond to the charges within a two-month deadline.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Top 10: Bartz in at Yahoo, Apple's Jobs out until June
Yahoo tapped Carol Bartz as its new CEO and in her first press conference she let it be known that the outside world is not calling the shots at her company. While she settled in to her new gig, Apple CEO Steve Jobs started a six-month medical leave, announcing that the health issues he publicly disclosed last week are more complicated than he thought they would be. Otherwise, the drumbeat of bad news related to the economy continued, with Nortel Networks going bankrupt, Google cutting services and jobs, and reports that Microsoft will announce big layoffs next week.
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1. Bartz won't rush into Microsoft deal: Former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz was named Yahoo CEO Tuesday and in her first press conference in the new job she said that Yahoo needs to be allowed to set its own course. "More than anything, let's give this company some friggin' breathing room," she told reporters in a conference call. "It's been too crazy, everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do, what's best for them. That's gonna stop."
2. Jobs to take leave of absence until June: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence until June, saying that "during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs issued a rare public letter last week saying that the weight he lost over last year owed to a hormonal imbalance. His thin appearance has led to ongoing speculation about his health given that he had treatment for pancreatic cancer several years ago. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook will take over day-to-day operations during Jobs' leave.
3. Microsoft-Nortel relationship again under the microscope: Financially ailing vendor Nortel Networks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, leading to questions about the viability of the company long term and whether customers will stick by North America's largest telecommunications equipment vendor, which is based in Toronto. The filing also calls into question the stability of Nortel's four-year deal with Microsoft, which the companies signed in 2006.
4. Google prunes popular services from its portfolio and Google will lay off 100 recruiters, shift to fewer sites: Google is eliminating or ending support for a number of its less popular free Web-based services as it aims to redistribute engineering resources. The company is also laying off 100 recruiters and shutting engineering offices in Texas, Norway and Sweden to cope with the lousy economy.
5. Microsoft considers major job cuts: The Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources that Microsoft is going to announce major layoffs next week, although rumors of impending job cuts at the company have been swirling for a while now. Although the company has steadily hired more employees over the last decade, it has also nipped and tucked its head count now and again. Still, the layoffs expected next week could be the largest in its 34-year history.
6. Microsoft refreshes Azure cloud tools: Microsoft refreshed versions of its Windows Azure software development kit and Azure tools for Visual Studio, which support the planned Windows Azure cloud services platform. The updates offer improved integration with Visual Studio, performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios and improvements to the storage client and ASP.Net provider samples. Bug fixes are featured as well, as is added support to debug Silverlight in a Web role.
7. Netbooks won't save PC market this year, surveys say: After six years of growth, global PC shipments dipped 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same period of 2007, analyst IDC found. Both IDC and Gartner expect netbook shipments to outpace other computer shipments in 2009 -- netbook shipments could possibly double -- but that isn't going to be enough to push overall global shipments above last year's numbers.
8. Palm request for app store advice opens floodgate: Andrew Shebanow is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new OS and so he figured he would get input from developers on how they think the system should work. He posted an item about that on his blog on Jan. 8 and was quickly swamped with input, so he removed the blog post this week, saying that the swarm of responses took him and Palm by surprise. The company has now started a developer blog for input and Shebanow is going to work on developer outreach. All of this is yet another indication of how wildly popular mobile apps have become.
9. Facebook has Whopper of a problem with Burger King campaign: Burger King's campaign offering a free hamburger to Facebook users who deleted 10 friends from their networks didn't go over so well with Facebook. After days of negotiations between the companies, Burger King has stopped its Whopper Sacrifice campaign rather than make changes Facebook wanted it to make. The campaign led to 60,000 people paring down their Facebook friends' lists, which may be an indication that, just as Burger King suspected, people are adding "friends" they don't really know.
10. Court orders White House to preserve e-mail: White House employees of President George Bush have been ordered by a federal court to look for and preserve e-mail on their workstations and other devices. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive filed lawsuits in September 2007, asking that the White House be ordered to preserve e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2005. White House officials have acknowledged that some 5 million e-mails are missing from that period.
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Gartner's 5 predictions for BI in 2009 and beyond
Through 2012 more than 35 percent of the largest 5,000 companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets, according to analyst house Gartner.
That's Gartner's first, out of five, predictions for the business intelligence fray for 2009 through 2012.
Not surprisingly -- particularly in these turbulent economic times -- the overarching theme of BI will be to combat such errors and to instead deliver greater business value, the research firm said.
[ Related: Microstrategy this week updated its BI suite. | And learn what InfoWorld has determined to be the five top spending priorities for these tight times -- BI being one of them. ]?
Gartner's second prediction is that by 2012 business units, rather than IT, will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for BI. The problem here, Gartner wrote, is that "business users have lost confidence in the ability of [IT] to deliver the information they need to make decisions."
So business units will increase spending on packaged analytics, including corporate performance management, predictive analytics, and online marketing BI wares. In so doing, however, they "risk creating silos of applications and information, which will limit cross-function analysis, add complexity, and delay corporate planning and execution of changes," said Nigel Rayner, research vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement.
Gartner's third prediction is that by 2012, 20 percent of companies will sign up for an SaaS-style industry-specific analytic application. As they prepare to do so, Gartner recommends that IT align with business users to incorporate a manageable number of niche vertical providers into their BI portfolios.
Fourth prediction: This year collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category. It will meld social software into the larger BI platform capabilities to tap into what Gartner calls a groundswell of interest in informal collaboration.
"Social software allows users to tag assumptions made in the decision-making process to the BI framework," Kurt Schlegel, Gartner research vice president commented in the report. "This approach dramatically improves the business value of BI because it ties all the good stuff BI delivers (e.g. analytical insights, KPIs) directly to decisions made in the business."
And Gartner's fifth prediction is that by 2012 one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered via coarse-grained mashups. IT shops are no longer focusing on grand visions such as SOA, which involve building composite applications out of fine-grained services or portals that merely display operational and analytical information next to each other, the analyst firm explained. Coarse-grained mashups, on the other hand, can be used to overlay analytical insights.
As IT shops move to make the most out of their BI platforms in the coming years, Gartner offers this piece of advice:
"Businesses should not trust their mega-vendor to solve all their integration problems. Vendors move slowly to integrate the disparate code bases they have acquired," Gartner explained in the report.? "Reliance on one vendor also limits the ability to use best-of-breed capabilities and weakens the buyer's negotiating position."
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Update: IBM buying SaaS e-mail to bolster Bluehouse cloud platform
IBM is planning to buy the e-mail service assets of Outblaze, a large Hong Kong application service provider, to help beef up its Bluehouse social-networking and collaboration platform, IBM said late Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Outblaze is privately held and says it supports more than 76 million users across 480,000 domains with its white label e-mail, social-networking, and collaboration services.
[ Confused by cloud computing hype? Get the facts from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. ]
Combined, the Outblaze and Bluehouse technology will enable enterprise customers to tap IBM for "all their messaging needs, whether on-premise or online," and smaller companies will get a "simple to acquire" and integrated bundle of tools, IBM said in a statement.
"Unlike most of IBM's recent software acquisitions it looks like Outblaze is as much about a volume customer list as technology," said James Governor, a UK-based analyst with Redmonk. "In the game of counting mailboxes, IBM was clearly seeing real competition from new market entrants. That said, high-volume, simple hosted mail was a hole in IBM's portfolio."
IBM spokesman Mike Azzi said Friday that the company plans to reveal more details about how Outblaze's software will fit into Bluehouse next week, during the Lotusphere conference in Orlando.
Bluehouse, which is now in beta, focuses on making online meetings, networking and file sharing easier and more effective. The platform, which should play a prominent role at Lotusphere, is part of IBM's overall push toward delivering services from the cloud to customers.
IBM is starting to make a habit of announcing acquisition plans just before Lotusphere. Last year, the company revealed its intent to purchase the Canadian company Net Integration Technologies. The vendor's technology was eventually rolled into IBM's Lotus Foundations software appliances for SMBs.
This story was updated on January 16, 2009
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Firm seeks to bar Nokia, RIM, Palm from importing devices into U.S.
A patent-holding company from Texas is seeking to bar six companies -- including BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Palm, and Nokia -- from importing handheld devices into the U.S. for allegedly violating its patents.
Saxon Innovations, based in Tyler, Texas, filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Dec. 19, and on Thursday, the ITC voted to investigate the complaint. If the ITC finds that the complaint is legitimate, it could bar the handheld makers from importing products, such as mobile phones and remote control devices, containing the patented inventions.
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At issue are three patents that Saxon purchased in July 2007, a patent for keypad monitor with keypad activity-based activation; a patent for an apparatus and method for disabling interrupt marks in processors or the like; and a patent for a device and method for interprocessor communication by using mailboxes owned by processor devices. Saxon, with five employees, purchased about 180 U.S. patents formerly owned by Advanced Micro Devices or Legerity in 2007, according to its ITC complaint.
The keypad monitor patent was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in August 1993 to AMD. The interrupt marks patent was granted in June 1996, and the mailbox patent was granted in March 1997, both to AMD.
In recent years, several large tech vendors have pushed the U.S. Congress to make it more difficult for patent holders to file claims. Tech vendors including Microsoft, IBM, and Intel have complained that it's too easy for patent-holding companies to win huge patent awards against tech companies with products that may contain dozens of patents.
Saxon didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment on its ITC complaint.
Saxon's complaint alleges that Nokia's N73 mobile phone violates two of the three patents, and its N95 phone violates the third. RIM's BlackBerry 8100 Pearl device violates two of the patents, and Palm's Treo 700p violates two of the patents, according to Saxon's complaint.
Other companies named in the ITC complaint are High Tech Computer of Taiwan and a U.S. subsidiary; Panasonic of Japan and two subsidiaries; and AVC Networks of Japan. The ITC complaint involves so-called Section 337 violations of the U.S. Tariff Act of 1930.
Representatives of Nokia, Panasonic, RIM and Palm weren't immediately available for comment.
In June, Saxon also filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that six computer makers, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, have violated two of the patents in the ITC complaint.
The next step in the ITC investigation is for an administration judge to hold a hearing on the complaint. Within 45 days, the ITC will set a target date for completing the investigation.
ITC patent complaints can result in several different outcomes, said Peg O'Laughlin, an ITC spokeswoman. Some complaints are dropped, some settled, but "many, many" result in an ITC ruling barring imports of products, she said.
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