What's new in week 30, 2008

Monday, 2008-07-21, Copenhagen
If we think of what has been for PC developers in the past 20 years, Microsoft is at least one of the major eyehole-attraction vendors (I could think of linux as another potential). Now Google is joining the game. People have been talking about Google deploying dynamic language runtime just like what MS has been doing. Well, it looks really difficult for a start-up developer to choose which way to go.

Friday, 2008-07-25, Copenhagen
Oracle to look at ECM? Not a surprise. The enterprise software market has been experiencing a lot of acquisitions in the past 3 years. ECM is always a big cake for giants to share. Oracle has just announced that it will acquire Skywire Software’s business on application software. The acquisition will improve Oracle’s content management business. Another benefit is that the insurance software of Skywire is also added to Oracle’s insurance business software suite. It seems that SAS will start feeling panic of losing its business in the insurance market.

Microsoft has recently announced its acquisition of a Portugal-based private company MobiComp to enhance its strength in mobile data protection and sharing services technology and business. After Gate’s leave, Microsoft is continuing its movement towards the mobile market.

Oracle is getting more money at the recession world? Well, according to a recent report, Oracle sales and profits actually grew over 20 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which is the highest growth rate in 10 years. Well, are we in an IT recession time?

Revenge from RealNetworks! Online music store Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks is launching DRM free downloads. So Apple’s iTune is not the only one controlling the market any more. We will see how RealNetworks approaches consumers’ mobile phones and MP3 players in the near future.

Indian IT services giant Infosys has just expanded its education center in Mysore with upto $380m facility. It seems that outsourcing market is fast growing especially in the recent years and the Indian company is aware of its great potential in this scenario.

AMD has a new CEO! What a great piece of news to Intel’s biggest rival. Well, it is hardly great. We definitely need AMD to keep Intel running on the technology world. Let us just hope the new chief, Meyer, is able to bring the company back to profit after 8 successive quarters of losses.