Microsoft Edges Closer Toward EC Compliance
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft completed a big step toward finally complying with the European Commission's landmark 2004 antitrust ruling Thursday when it announced it met the deadline for the official submission of technical documentation about Windows Server's communication protocols. While the preliminary stamp of approval from European regulators for the receipt of 8,500 pages of documentation was a positive move for the world's largest software company, Microsoft is still a ways from escaping the EC's doghouse.READ MORE >

The Microsoft-Novell Marriage of Two Minds Starts to Go Schizo
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

You knew that any peace between Windows and Linux couldn't last very long. Soon after Microsoft's chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, and Novell's chief executive officer, Ron Hovsepian, announced their landmark deal to see Microsoft distribute 350,000 SUSE Linux licenses, work on Windows-Linux interoperability, and cooperate on software patents, Ballmer caused an uproar by stating that Linux violates unspecified Microsoft patents and that the Novell deal "appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property." READ MORE >

Hitachi Brings BladeSymphony Blade Servers to North America
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hitachi America, the North American subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, wants a bigger piece of the IT pie in this hemisphere, and to that end the subsidiary today announced that the BladeSymphony blade server product line it sells in Japan has been tweaked with a new set of processor and virtualization technologies and will now be available in the United States and Canada. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Stay the Recourse
by Hesh Wiener

IBM is hooting about SOA, which stands for Services Oriented Architecture and which approximately means putting the changing needs of end users at the heart of computer systems development. We don't know where end users were in the landscape before; we had, apparently in mistake, thought they were always the most prominent feature. In any event, this kind of SOA stuff, even if it makes some excellent points, is largely a red herring. It won't reduce software or support costs. To do that, IBM resorts to another SOA, Substitute Offshore Artisans. READ MORE >