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Oracle Corp. has shocked the software world by announcing that it will set out to buy all outstanding shares of PeopleSoft. The US$5.1 billion takeover bid comes just days after PeopleSoft announced a major acquisition of its own. Starting Monday, Oracle will offer $16 per share for PeopleSoft shares, a premium of just under $1, or about 17 percen...

With an enormous volume of code comes the need to keep it current, and Microsoft has been relentless in this task, issuing scores of updates and patches every day. In fact, staying on top of Windows updates has become a tricky endeavor for IT managers, who often must maintain hundreds or thousands of machines, sometimes equipped with different operating systems and various applications.

IBM and the rise of Linux are the two main competitive threats to Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer told employees in a widely circulated e-mail message In what amounted to a state-of-the-company note, Ballmer also said Microsoft will delay the release of its Longhorn software platform if necessary in order to release a near-perfect product.

The United States is a wired nation, but not completely so. Two recent reports paint starkly different pictures of the connectedness of the average U.S. resident. The first, released by Technology Futures of Austin, Texas, states that in 2003, the proportion of American households using broadband of some kind -- DSL, cable or, in some rare cases, wireless -- will surpass 20 percent. More and more people are buying permanent connections to the Net. At the other end of the spectrum, a report published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates the digital divide is still a concern: One-fourth of U.S. residents do not use the Internet at all, including many people who live in homes with wired connections.

In a bid to boost its often-mocked Trustworthy Computing initiative, Microsoft has reached an agreement to work with VeriSign to make Microsoft products more secure. The company also said it will train a new generation of security experts to master its software by adding a security certification to its existing training offerings. This move reflec...

IBM has announced that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the way it booked revenue in 2000 and 2001, making Big Blue the latest in a growing crowd of technology companies to find itself under SEC scrutiny. The company said it has been notified that the SEC has launched a formal investigation into "certain types of customer t...

Although Ruben Studdard has officially won the American Idol title, edging out Clay Aiken by a razor-thin margin, the search for America's e-business idol is still under way -- and industry observers seem as split over the contenders as the voting public was over the contestants on the top-rated TV talent show. We asked a few industry analysts to ...

In a move that significantly alters the business software landscape, PeopleSoft has announced it will buy J.D. Edwards in a deal worth US$1.7 billion. Assuming it clears regulatory hurdles and wins the blessing of shareholders, the all-stock transaction will create the world's second largest corporate software maker, behind Oracle. The merged comp...

When the mainstream first discovered the newly spun Web, a new breed of spider emerged: the cybersquatter, an individual or company that registered many domainnames, most of them well-known brands, and resold them at high prices With some asking prices hitting seven figures at the height of the dot-com boom, companies began to cry for justice. Fort...

AOL Time Warner and Microsoft have agreed to a far-reaching settlement in which the software giant will pay US$750 million to AOL to dispose of allegations it acted unfairly to monopolize the Web browser market. The settlement brings an end to the browser wars that began eight years ago when Microsoft set its Internet Explorer (IE) browser on a pa...

Ask Jeeves has sold its lagging enterprise software unit and has announced plans to raise US$100 million for a concerted push into the consumer search market, which the company said may include acquisitions. The Emeryville, California-based company said it inked the deal to sell its Jeeves Solutions unit to privately held Kanisa for $4.25 million,...

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 enterprises time after time. However, for a host of rea...

Investors are lining up to buy Google shares already. There's only one problem: The company hasn't had an IPO yet and, for that matter, hasn't said it's even 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 even call exuberance (and still ot...

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 US$35 million in damages. The jury found in favor of MercExchange LLC, which claimed eBay had infringed on patents that firm held for technology enabling some of eBays fixed price and ...

In some industries, it is easy to tell who is at the top of the heap. Theoffice software realm has Microsoft, the beer world has Budweiser, and formuch of the cola-loving planet, Coke is it. Among online brokerages, however, crowning a king is not so simple Although success can be measured by most trades or most assets, these can bemisleading disti...

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 junior programmer can make that work" is a common refrain.

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, who led America Online from its founding to its landmark takeover of Time Warner in 2000, has expressed interest in examining the option.

While the Microsoft vs. Linux debate rages in boardroom meetings and aroundIT water coolers, IBM has chosen sides already Although Big Blue maintains a friendly relationship with Microsoft, itsefforts in touting Linux worldwide have shown that the company isstrolling down the aisle hand-in-hand with the Linux penguin....

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 Amazon vice president Curtis Kopf said the upgrade is aimed at ensuring customers have "the best possible online...

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 built-in spam stopper in Apple Computer's Mail program, which I've used daily since it was released with the Jaguar update of OS X last year. Amid the frantic hand-wringing over unwanted e-mail, I've heard relatively little mention of this program, so I thought I'd offer my impressions gleaned from nearly 10 months of using the product.