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AOL Time Warner and Microsoft have agreed to a far-reaching settlement in which the software giant will pay $750 million to AOL to dispose of allegations that it acted unfairly to monopolize the Web browser market. The settlement ends the browser wars that began eight years ago and clears the way fo...

Ask Jeeves has sold its lagging enterprise software unit and has announced plans to raise $100 million for a concerted push into the consumer search market, which the company said may include acquisitions. Yankee Group analyst Rob Lancaster said the move is likely to help Ask Jeeves battle Overture,...

For a time, small businesses probably felt like little kids getting bumped out of line for the ice cream truck. They would jump up and down, money in hand, trying to catch the attention of software vendors, only to see those vendors choose to do business with larger, stronger, deeper-pocketed enterp...

Investors are lining up to buy Google shares already. There's only one problem: The company hasn't had an IPO yet and hasn't even said it's close to going public. That kind of restlessness is refreshingly retro, but it's also dangerously reminiscent. The same kind of enthusiasm, which some might eve...

A federal jury in Norfolk, Virginia, has found that eBay and its subsidiary Half.com willfully violated patented technology and has ordered the auction giant to pay $35 million in damages. The jury found in favor of MercExchange LLC, which claimed eBay had infringed on patents that firm held for tec...

In some industries, it is easy to tell who is at the top of the heap. The office software realm has Microsoft, the beer world has Budweiser, and for much of the cola-loving planet, Coke is it. Among online brokerages, however, crowning a king is not so simple. Potential candidates have strengths and...

An oft-repeated supposition when talking about a new software or hardware product is that in-house IT staff can compensate for what the technology lacks. It's often presumed that somebody on staff can patch, tweak, rejigger or jury-rig technology to make it do what it won't do "out of the box." "Any...

AOL Time Warner executives may be mulling the possibility of spinning off the company's America Online unit, reviving a discussion that had been considered dead. According to published reports, former chairman Steve Case has expressed interest in examining the option. However, analysts were quick to...

While the Microsoft vs. Linux debate rages in boardroom meetings and around IT water coolers, IBM has chosen sides already. Although Big Blue maintains a friendly relationship with Microsoft, its efforts in touting Linux worldwide have shown that the company is strolling down the aisle hand-in-hand ...

Amazon.com has announced it will use Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series products to boost its ability to stream music samples to customers from its family of e-tail sites, including its own site, CDnow.com, VirginMega.com and Borders.com. Although the choice of Windows Media Player is a key part of ...

At the peak of the business-to-business boom, which coincided with the dot-com glory days, there were more than 2,000 B2B exchanges, according to eMarketer senior analyst Steve Butler. However, most of those fledgling enterprises did not survive the subsequent bust. In fact, insiders are predicting ...

I won't say I don't receive pitches for the occasional mortgage discount or Vegas vacation, the latest performance-enhancing elixir or anatomical wonder pills. Somehow those untidy and still slightly amusing offenders still wriggle past my defenses. In general, though, I've had good results with a b...

No doubt the Internet scams U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is targeting are a threat to living happily ever after on the Web. No doubt they're far more than just a nuisance. But this is feel-good law enforcement -- the equivalent of rounding up street-level drug dealers while the Colombian cart...

Hewlett-Packard turned in an impressive second quarter, beating targets for revenue and profits, but said it will continue aggressively cutting costs in the wake of its merger with Compaq by laying off another 3,500 workers by the end of this year. HP said revenue totaled $18 billion in the quarter ...

By all indications, Windows Server 2003 is engineered to be more secure than its predecessors. Microsoft has adopted a two-pronged approach to achieving this goal: The company has added several new features intended to boost security, and it has altered the operating system's out-of-the-box settings...