At the Network+Interop trade show in Las Vegas last week, Microsoft made a whole slew of announcements that ranged across its product lines. None of them were particularly related to the show, but the PR departments of IT vendors often use big trade shows as an excuse to clear their desks. Microsoft put out lots of releases last week, trumpeting .NET and Active Directory, but the interesting announcements were enhanced integration software for Unix, an accelerator for building SQL Server-based data warehouses, and an integrated portal/content manager for Windows.

Microsoft called its eighteenth and final witness last week in the appeal of its antitrust lawsuit, and the nine states that are dissenting a settlement put forth by the Justice Department and nine other states involved in the suit declined to call additional rebuttal witnesses to the stand. These two moves mark an end of testimony in the case, which is the second that Microsoft has faced for alleged anticompetitive acts committed in the computer marketplace. Now the fate of Microsoft rests with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who will rule on the penalties Microsoft will face after having been declared a monopolist.

Gartner's Dataquest unit released its study of the 2001 database management systems market last week, and the results are more positive for IBM than they are for the industry as a whole. According to Gartner Dataquest's numbers, IBM increased its share of the database market from 33.7 percent to 34.7 percent, topping rival database vendor Oracle, whose market share dropped from 34.1 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2001.

MAPICS scored a first among iSeries ERP vendors last week when it announced that its enterprise suite of software for manufacturers now runs on iSeries Linux. While the announcement thrust the Atlanta, Georgia-based, software company ahead of its competitors in the movement toward open-source software and Linux, MAPICS insists that its Linux move is not about radically altering how software is shaped and distributed, but about giving customers as much choice as possible.

Right at the heart of the e-business applications infrastructure, regardless of the company, is the Web application server. It is perhaps the most critical of all components in devising an e-business strategy. Why? Because in the future most custom and packaged applications will run on the application server. The vendors who compete in this $3 billion market--including IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Sybase--are scratching and clawing for each customer that they can capture.

IBM once tried to combine all of its midrange computers into one. The single machine that would replace all IBM midrange products of the early 1980s was called Fort Knox. Fort Knox, had it been successfully built, would have absorbed System/3 and its children, System/32 and System/36. It would have supplanted System/38 and its eventual descendants, the AS/400 and iSeries.