Month in review - February 2004

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Month in review - February 2004

10 February 2006

Information Age's round-up of the month's news.

SCO Group, the company that claims to hold intellectual property rights over much of Linux, the open-source operating system, carried out its threat to sue Linux users by launching lawsuits against automotive giant Daimler-Chrysler and a US car parts retailer. Meanwhile, SCO said that the various legal battles are costing it around $3 million a quarter: bad news for a company that suffered a 16% fall in first-quarter revenue to just $11.4 million. Still, a leaked email suggested that software giant Microsoft, whose Windows monopoly is threatened by Linux, was bankrolling SCO's campaign. SCO said the content of the email had been misinterpreted.

After a long inquiry, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) concluded that an Oracle takeover of rival PeopleSoft would restrict choice for customers of high-end enterprise application suites, and pledged to block the deal on anti-competitive grounds. Oracle said it would challenge that legal opinion in the courts. The DoJ's judgement came two weeks after PeopleSoft formally rejected Oracle's increased offer of $9.4 billion.

Hewlett-Packard posted a strong rise in revenues and profits in the first quarter. Revenues rose 9% to $19.5 billion, while net income was up by one third to $962 million. The figures were attributed to an increase in sales of servers, PCs and printers.

Telecoms giant BT won one of the last big contracts in the National Health Service's ongoing IT modernisation programme, scooping up a £530 million deal to provide and manage a broadband network that will expand to eventually include the entire public sector.

Echoes of the late-1990s telecoms boom reverberated around the markets as network hardware maker Juniper Networks paid $3.6 billion in stock for fast-growing security appliance maker NetScreen Technologies.

IT services giant EDS capped a disastrous year by posting a $1.7 billion loss for 2003 and admitting that new contract signings during the year had plunged in value to $14 billion compared to $24.4 billion in 2002. One beneficiary has been Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), which says that its 2004 fiscal year, which ends in April, will be its most successful, with new business already totalling $17 billion.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett ate a large helping of humble pie when he admitted that the company would mimic the 64-bit computing strategy of its smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), by introducing 64-bit extensions to its 32-bit Xeon server chip line. The strategic shift leaves a question mark hanging over the future of Intel's pure 64-bit Itanium microprocessor, which is already being outsold by a large margin by AMD's 64-bit Opteron.

In the latest twist to Brussels' long-running antitrust case against Microsoft, the European Union's single market commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, appeared to step in to ensure that any punishment levied against the software giant is not too harsh. Critics said the commissioner was more worried about Microsoft contesting the decision in court.

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