Applications

The European Union has slapped Microsoft with a record $1.35 billion fine. "Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," said European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. $1.35 billion i...

Another lawsuit against Microsoft reportedly has received the go-ahead to proceed. This time, a federal judge in Seattle approved a class action suit against the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant over alleged marketing claims that various computers labeled as "Vista Capable" actually were not suit...

The European Union is looking at Microsoft's vow to commit to openness and interoperability with a jaundiced eye. The EU's executive branch, the European Commission, will welcome "any move towards genuine interoperability," it said, while pointing out that Microsoft had made "at least four similar s...

Businesses have data storage issues -- but so do individuals. The former problem is being addressed; the latter is a relatively untapped market. That is likely the thinking behind EMC's acquisition of Pi. EMC, a Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage vendor, is acquiring privately held Pi, a Seattle-based s...

Promising hefty productivity increases and a lower TCO, Tibco Software this week announced its beefed-up ActiveMatrix 2.0, which aims to simplify building and managing service-oriented architectures. This latest release adds BusinessWorks, which is available either in standalone mode or as a contain...

A $2.2 billion deal 3Com had been planning involving a private equity group and a Chinese telecommunications firm apparently fell apart Wednesday over security concerns. 3Com, a Marlborough, Mass.-based network equipment manufacturer, had agreed in September to accept an offer of $5.30 per share fro...

Microsoft has announced one of its most sweeping executive reorganizations in years, promoting 14 and announcing the departure of three. Many of the changes are aimed at the online and mobile units, where the overlap with potential acquisition target Yahoo is the greatest. Some of the changes had be...

In January, network security tools startup Packet Analytics launched Net/FSE, or Network Forensic Search Engine. Net/FSE is the first commercial search engine for enterprise network data to focus on security incident response by harnessing the analysis of NetFlow data. It is designed to exploit the ...

Adding another twist to its efforts to gain business adoption for its Web-based applications, Google has released a Team Edition of Google Apps. Google Apps Team Edition allows users to sign up using their work e-mail addresses to gain access to a suite of Apps -- Google Docs, Calendar, Google Talk,...

Software as a Service, service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 technology are fundamentally changing the way people and organizations work, enabling greater degrees of collaboration and restructuring everything from business and operational processes to the way software is licensed and priced, acc...

Microsoft thought five years of oversight was long enough, and states that had fought the software giant over alleged monopolistic practices thought five more years were in order. Neither side got what it wanted. Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a federal district judge in Seattle, ruled on Tuesday to extend...

Microsoft posted an impressive quarter on Thursday, with Vista and Office sales setting the pace. The software giant also issued a strong outlook for the current quarter and all of 2008 -- something many of its fellow tech companies have been unable to do. Microsoft's earnings rose about 79 percent ...

Today's top companies know that the most effective way to grow revenue is by developing and maintaining strong relationships with current and potential clients. A company's own employees are building these relationships every day, and helping each other with introductions whenever possible. Unfortun...

IBM continues to emphasize software as part of its future road map. In laying out a plan to use its Lotus franchise to expand the number of small- and medium-sized businesses using its applications, Big Blue is taking aim at a key part of rival Microsoft's core market. At its annual Lotusphere trade...

IBM's relatively robust outlook and the details of its fourth quarter performance have helped restore some investor optimism toward the tech sector after a wild week that saw recession fears rise on weak results from the likes of Intel. IBM, which earlier in the week preannounced its earnings, said ...