Microsoft Corp., which surpassed General Electric Co. last month as the world's biggest company by market value, is the only technology stock remaining among the top 10, according to Bloomberg rankings. Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. fell off the list of the largest companies in the first half, replaced by BP Plc and Coca-Cola Co. The top-10 ranking represents a broader range of companies than it did during the late 1990s.
At the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999, seven of the 10 biggest companies were technology or telecommunications stocks. Since then, Cisco Systems Inc., Nokia Oyj, Lucent Technologies Inc., Intel, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG have dropped from the list.
In a move that could bring Microsoft and the Justice Department closer to an approved settlement deal, a federal judge said Tuesday that both parties had complied with laws governing antitrust settlements.
In a memorandum dated Monday but released Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly concluded the settling parties had complied with provisions of the Tunney Act. The memorandum is an important step forward in her approving the November settlement between the Justice Department, Microsoft and nine of 18 states.
"I would expect we will get her final ruling on the merits of the settlement quite soon," said Emmett Stanton, an antitrust attorney with Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, Calif. "There is no reason to issue that if the final decision is not coming fairly promptly."
A federal judge Tuesday rejected criticism that Microsoft Corp. failed to disclose fully the machinations that led to its antitrust settlement with the Justice Department. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Microsoft had provided enough details about its contacts with the government to satisfy the legal requirements for antitrust settlements. "Although Microsoft clearly could have been more fulsome in its descriptions, because the statute does not mandate the release of particular details relevant to a defendant's communications with the United States, the court finds that Microsoft's disclosure is sufficient to satisfy (the law)," Kollar-Kotelly said in the ruling.
In Tuesday's ruling, the judge took a preliminary step toward that decision, concluding that Microsoft and the department had complied with all the legal requirements in negotiating the settlement. "We're pleased the court affirmed our position," said Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler. She also concluded the law does not require the company to disclose its contacts with lawmakers in Congress, as some critics had argued. "The details demanded by (critics) go well beyond this basic function and likely would do little to inform the court's assessment of the public interest," the judge wrote.
Intel's upcoming Itanium 2 processor will come out at 900MHz and 1GHz, according to sources, and cost about the same as existing Itanium chips.
In all, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker will release three versions of the 64-bit chip for high-end servers next week: a 1GHz version containing 3MB of level three cache memory, a 1GHz version containing 1.5MB of cache, and a 900MHz version containing 1.5MB of cache. The cache-speed variations will allow Intel to sell the chip at different prices, depending on performance. Increasing the clock frequency, measured by megahertz, generally increases performance. As does increasing the size of the cache, a reservoir of memory for rapid data access. Itanium 2, formerly code-named McKinley, is designed to run in workstations and high-end servers containing four to 64 processors. Servers that contain the chip will compete against machines from Sun Microsystems and IBM.
XML will provide the technology standard necessary for Web services and Microsoft's .net platform will be the premier platform for development, general manager of developer platform and evangelism Vic Gundotra said at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Barcelona. Visual Basic.net will be key to the simple development of Web services, and will be the tool that carries the industry forward, he said. "Where the development of HTML allowed easy display of Web pages, Visual Studio will be the step that makes Web services possible." Gundotra also announced the launch of Visual J#.net, which allows developers to take an existing Java application and move it to .net for development in that environment.
Web services are set to grow next year with 90% of European developers and IT professionals saying they will develop services in 2003, according to a survey of delegates planning to attend this week's Microsoft TechEd conference in Barcelona. More than 1,750 people, from 62 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa answered the online survey during May and June, Microsoft said. More than half of survey respondents, 54%, said that their organisations are currently developing Web services and 90% will do so in 2003, Microsoft said. Almost all of those already working on Web services, some 94%, said that such services will open up new business opportunities, and 66% said that Web services would help people understand the value that technology brings to a business.
Industry analyst firm Gartner Dataquest announced this week that the PC industry has shipped over 1 billion personal computers in the roughly 25 years since the first PC, the Altair, debuted in 1974. Like most PCs built since then, the Altair was powered by an Intel microprocessor--an 8-bit 8080--though the power and flexibility of processors and PCs have expanded dramatically over the years. A basic Altair with 256 bytes of RAM (yes, bytes) cost about $400 in 1974, but the customer had to assemble the device, an often perilous and unsuccessful venture. And input occurred via binary switches on the device's front panel, with output through binary LEDs. Ah, the good old days.
America Online said Monday that it temporarily had blocked e-mail coming through servers from Microsoft's bCentral, a Web service focused on small businesses. An AOL representative said the problem cropped up when bCentral servers did not respond to queries from AOL to determine where the mail was coming from, leading the system to "time out." As a result, AOL temporarily suspended access to bCentral servers, the representative said. Access was restored by Monday evening, he added.
Microsoft said it was aware of the problem and has been working to resolve it. "We are working diligently with AOL to get this issue resolved ASAP," a Microsoft representative wrote in an e-mail interview.
Microsoft's much-publicized security push has cost real money--$100 million of person-hours went into the two-month hiatus in development of .Net server, according to David Thompson, vice president of Microsoft's Windows server products group. Close to 5000 people in the development team spent all of February and March learning security, Thompson told the Microsoft Tech Ed conference in Barcelona. This alone cost Microsoft $100 million, as well as putting back product schedules. Other product development teams will incur similar costs, he said. Issues of security and management are to the fore in Microsoft's .Net server demonstrations at Tech Ed, as Microsoft makes an effort to convince users it "means business". Unlike previous new operating systems from Microsoft, demos of .Net server focus heavily on issues such as authentication and policy administration.
A top European Union official said on Monday that a ruling in its Microsoft antitrust inquiry will happen by the end of the year. "We're completing our analysis" in the investigation, said Phillip Lowe, the next director general for Competition. The effort has focused on Microsoft's server software and streaming media technology. Lowe told a conference organized by the American Antitrust Institute that he expected to work closely with U.S. regulators, and he hinted that Europe was waiting for a federal judge to rule on the Microsoft case. A European decision likely will wait "until Microsoft has more clarity on the U.S. side," Lowe told reporters afterward. He stressed, however, that "we are addressing questions of interoperability, which are not quite the same as the initial judgment and appeal" in the United States. Lowe, previously the director of the EU's merger task force, starts his new job Sept. 1.