2004: A year in review
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
A 360° review of the IT year which marked the end of a period of austerity as budget growth returned to the positive.
|
|||
- SCO Group CEO Darl McBride offered $250,000 from the company's coffers as a reward for the conviction of the author of the 'MyDoom' worm. The worm successfully launched a denial of service attack on the software maker's website.
- Microsoft broke through the $10 billion quarterly revenue barrier when it reported that sales rose 19% to $10.2 billion in its quarter to the end of December. Some $300 million of that was due to the plunging value of the dollar.
- A plan by Munich City Council to migrate their desktop PCs from Microsoft Windows to Linux ran into trouble when the burghers admitted many small software suppliers were refusing to migrate their key applications to the open source operating system.
February
- SCO Group carried out its threat to sue Linux users by launching lawsuits against automotive giant Daimler-Chrysler and a US car parts retailer. A leaked email suggested that Microsoft was funding SCO's campaign, costing around $3 million a quarter.
- BT won one of the last big contracts in the National Health Service's ongoing IT modernisation programme, securing a £530 million deal to provide and manage a broadband network that will 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.
- 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.
March
- The European Commission slapped Microsoft with a record $615 million fine for abusing its monopoly of operating systems. It also told the software giant to stop bundling Media Player with Windows to the exclusion of other multimedia players. Analysts said Microsoft's appeal would run for years.
- Microsoft announced it would pay Sun Microsystems $2 billion to resolve patent disputes and settle outstanding competition issues, although Sun's plunging revenues and profits forced the company to lay off over 3,000 staff.
- Novell released its ambitious plans to bring Linux to the desktop, using a combination of the Linux distribution it acquired with its takeover of SuSE in January 2004, and Ximian the desktop user interface it acquired in August 2003.
- Sun Microsystems rejected IBM's call to open source the Java technology, dismissing the
- Siebel Systems' founder, chairman and CEO, Tom Siebel, stepped down. The 51-year-old executive, who still owns 11% of the customer relationship management software company, was replaced by IBM sales veteran Michael Lawrie.
- Capgemini, Ernst &Young, Europe's biggest IT services supplier, changed its name to Capgemini in a EU10060 million re-branding exercise forced on it by the terms of its 2000 acquisition of accountant Ernst &Young's IT consulting division.
May
- A product roadmap from Microsoft revealed its next-generation operating system, Longhorn, would not be released until 2007. Microsoft also gave in to pressure to extend support for its key products to a total of 10 years.
- Networking giant Cisco Systems suffered the embarrassment of a source code leak. The 800MBs of code was stolen by a hacker infiltrating Cisco's corporate network, according to Securitylabs.ru, a Russian web site that helpfully published every line of the source code.
- The UK got its first 'IT czar' as Ian Watmore was named head of e-government. Watmore, UK MD of consulting firm Accenture became one of the UK's highest-paid public sector IT employees.
- Telecoms equipment giant Nortel and wirelessLAN supplier Symbol admitted they were both facing federal investigations into their accounting practices. Nortel fired its CEO while one federal prosecutor described Symbol's accounting scandal as "breathtaking in scope". Symbol's ex-CEO Tomo Razmilovic was declared a fugitive by the US authorities and fled the UK to his native Croatia.
June
- Plans to establish a list of email addresses whose owners have permanently opted out of direct marketing were dismissed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US government agency leading the war on spam, as unworkable.
- The European Commission (EC) agreed to suspend its earlier ruling that aimed to force Microsoft to unbundle its Media Player product from Windows.
- The growing popularity of the Linux operating system led to concerns about how open source security issues should be handled. A program, 'evil.c', was discovered which uses lines of code written in the C language to crash several versions of Linux.
- The US Appeals Court upheld Microsoft's two-year-old anti-monopoly settlement with the Department of Justice, dismissing objections from the State of Massachusetts.
August
- IBM turned its Cloudscape Java database system over to the open source community, putting the product's half a million lines of code in the hands of the Apache Software Foundation.
- Microsoft retaliated against Linux by saying it would release a low-cost, pared-down version of its Windows operating system in South East Asia. Microsoft said 'Windows lite' would be "the most affordable operating system to date".
- Hewlett-Packard (HP) removed three of its key executives from the top of the company following disappointing results for its second quarter. All those culled were from the Compaq side of the business, which HP bought two years ago.
- Open source enthusiast Bruce Perens unveiled a new entrant to the Linux market. UserLinux is said to offer the same functionality as other enterprise Linux distributions, but without the cost.
September
- Capgemini shocked market observers when it announced net losses of €135 million, following "significant" cost overruns on contracts signed in 2001/2. Analysts had predicted that losses would halve to around €40 million.
- JP Morgan Chase, the investment bank and financial services giant, cancelled a $5 billion, seven-year IT outsourcing contract with IBM following JP Morgan's acquisition of Bank One in January which gave it the "enhanced capabilities, tools and processes" to do the job itself.
- Telecoms regulator Ofcom launched a numbering system for Internet telephony, to encourageadoption of voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. A survey published by AT&T and the Economist Intelligence Unit found that 43% of companies are using, testing or planning to implement VoIP within the next two years.
October
- German software giant SAP prepared to launch a subscription-based version of its enterprise software, despite having resisted the 'pay-as-you-go' software market before.
- The UK's government procurement agency, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), issued a report supporting the use of open source software in the public sector, saying it "can generate significant savings".
- Sun posted an increase in first-quarter revenues for the first time since 2001, although it continued to experience losses. Sun's net loss for its first quarter was $174 million, down from a net loss of $286 million a year ago.
November
- Software maker Novell filed a lawsuit against Microsoft alleging illegal attempts to monopolise the office applications market when Novell owned WordPerfect. The new case came hot on the heels on an out-of-court settlement of $536 million that Microsoft paid to Novell in the NetWare regulatory case.
- Catastrophic failures at the UK's Child Support Agency were partly blamed on a £456 million computer system built by Electronic Data Systems. An internal memo from within the services giant described its product as "badly designed, badly tested and badly implemented."
- BT struck a deal to buy US-based voice and data network provider Infonet Services Corp for £520 million. The aggregate worth of the acquisition was £310 million - less than one year's annual revenue for Infonet.
| ||
| ||
April
| ||
July
| ||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
