Business

The European Commission is concluding its latest antitrust case against Microsoft by accepting the company's promise to offer Windows users a choice of Web browsers, Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes announced on Wednesday. Specifically, in March Microsoft will issue an update that enables the m...

Wednesday's announcement by the Federal Trade Commission that it is suing Intel over its business practices must have looked like computer-generated deja vu to the technology industry. Those who were around for the Clinton Justice Department's case against Microsoft in the late 1990s are hearing fam...

From Australia to Italy, from Canada to Columbia, and from the U.S. to South Africa, pragmatism is the order of the day for IT departments as they struggle to stretch their 2010 budgets and resources to make much needed infrastructure upgrades in the face of a still uncertain and tight economy. Thos...

Amazon seems to be writing a self-help book of its own. You could call it, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective E-Reader Companies, and the first item on that list would appear to be: Lock in an exclusive deal with one of the most popular business writers ever. Amazon announced on Tuesday that Steph...

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear a case that centers on text-messaging privacy policies for employees in the workplace. The Court could reinforce employees' rights, prompting employers to issue ever more stringent policies on workplace communications, including stepped-up monitoring in ord...

Oracle has pledged it will not assert copyright claims over MySQL and that it will extend terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses of the database for five years in the hope that the European Commission will approve its $7.4 billion pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The EC has ind...

The proposed $30 billion Comcast-NBC Universal deal has entered the labyrinthine process of winning Congressional approval from the antitrust gurus and the Federal Communications Commission. Small cable operators, which apparently still exist, fear that they will be driven out of business by the ...

Despite plunging revenues due to the resistance of European regulators to its pending acquisition by Oracle, Sun Microsystems has rolled out enhancements to three key products in its Java platform. The upgrades focus on providing more flexibility to developers. Much of the new functionality has like...

The Hollywood trade newspaper Variety is putting its Web site behind a "pay wall" starting Thursday -- reserving its online content for paid subscribers and hoping its advertisers will stick around despite the smaller Internet audience. Variety plans to shut off free access gradually, asking one in ...

For every traditional media publisher who tries to place Google at the scene of the crime -- the death of newspapers -- the search giant offers up a new alibi. The latest defense exhibit is Wednesday's announcement of Google "Living Stories," an online experiment that organizes news around a specifi...

With the release of beta versions of its Chrome browser for the Mac and Linux platforms, Google looks to be laying the groundwork for becoming a major player in the next wave of computing. The Web browser one uses is being increasingly viewed as the next application platform, and getting the Chrome ...

Five leading American publishers, including Time and Conde Nast, officially unveiled what is, effectively, an online digital newsstand on Tuesday. The announcement ended months of speculation about the project. The five will offer a service from which readers can buy subscriptions to their publicati...

Selling wireless and media products online is a complex challenge that often falls short of the expectations of seasoned online shoppers and results in a frustrating user experience. Wireless and cable operators, wireless resellers and handset manufacturers try to mirror online shopping with their o...

Comcast just bought itself a nice little present for the holidays: NBC Universal. The cable network will have a controlling stake in NBC once the deal is flattened out, and in return, it's giving General Electric $6.5 billion along with $7.25 billion worth of programming. If everything passes muster...

It's official: Comcast has engineered what appears to be the biggest media joint venture of the year -- a multibillion-dollar merger that will combine General Electric's NBC Universal with Comcast's own cable networks. Once complete, Comcast will take majority ownership of NBC, ending GE's 20 year c...