2005 – The Year in Review – H1

January: Microsoft is not appealing

Microsoft has decided to comply with the European courts in respect of creating a version of its operating system that does not have Media Player embedded. It was always stretching the definition of what an operating system is to even think that a media player or even a browser should be a component of Windows.

 

February: Carly’s Fiorina’d

The writing was on the wall for Hewlett Packard’s CEO Carly Fiorina.  Speaking at the Davos World Summit she predicted a cautious return to spending, which sounded odd given the record breaking figures coming in from most of HP’s peers. A recent abrupt departure from the HP board suggested that something was brewing. Well now Carly has been shown the door; the implicit message being that the acquisition of Compaq has not worked. Perhaps the road is now clear to take the advice of many analysts and spin HP off into two separate businesses (consumer and enterprise).

 

March: Larry Ellison – Shopoholic?

Oracle CEO Laurence J Ellison, is an impulsive shopper. If he thinks someone else is getting a bargain, he wants it. Only recently PeopleSoft’s takeover of J D Edwards prompted the Oracle CEO to acquire them both. German rival Sap has been eyeing retail sector application provider Retek for some time and was in the process of queuing up at the checkout to make the purchase. However Mr Ellison has attempted to yank the goods out of the hands of Sap CEO Henning Kagermann with a counter offer. Retek management need just sit back and watch their share price go asymptotic.

 

April: SCO becomes Unix standards body

Well SCO thinks so. Sun Microsystems plans to release its Unix offering Solaris as an open source product. In the process it has sought permission from SCO to do this. SCO, as you may recall, has a business model that in essence involves suing anybody that distributes or uses Linux. It claims that Linux infringes the IPR associated with its own flavour of Unix. SCO’s influence in the Unix marketplace is somewhat disproportionate to its actual market share. Fortunately for Sun, SCO has given its blessing to Solaris.

 

May: Google – The Web Stargate

Google has come up with an ingenious ‘game over’ web offering. It has just released a beta version of its own ‘plug in’ browser that will deliver web pages to the user’s desktop at lightening speed. The only issue is that users will not be surfing the web, but Google’s web database. ‘So what’ you might ask. Well this will enable Google to monitor your every move, which is a little creepy, but will also make it easy for Google to sell your profile to advertisers given its intimate understanding of your ‘web habits’.

 

June: Microsoft’s fine according to European Commission

The European Commission had taken a firm stance in respect of Microsoft’s alleged monopolistic practices. The 500m euro fine was an irritation to the software giant, but insisting that elements of Microsoft’s intellectual property become ‘open source’ would have, I imagine, caused Bill Gates to become apoplectic. The EC felt that Microsoft needed an incentive to overcome it’s inertia in respect to this sanction, and so announced that from the start of June, Microsoft would have to pay a fine of circa $5m per day until it complied. Microsoft’s lawyers, experts in brinkmanship, have made a proposal, which appears to broadly satisfy the EC. However the thorny issue of open source appears to remain unaddressed.