European court has turned down an appeal by Microsoft to delay hard-hitting sanctions from the European Commission. In March, the European Commission imposed the sanctions on Microsoft after finding that it had abused the virtual monopoly of its Windows computer operating system. The Commission demanded Microsoft change its business practices, and levied a fine of 497m euros (£331m; $613m), the biggest it had ever imposed in an anti-trust case.
BBC is reporting at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4117217.stm
Flexbeta is reporting that Adobe has finally released the Adobe Acrobat Reader version 7. It has been in beta for quite a long time. They say it is fast. Let us check it out. You can check the downlod link here http://www.flexbeta.net/main/comments.php?catid=5&shownews=10971.
TechNet Radio has come up with an open discussion on the difference and TCO of Linux versus Windows. Here is an excerpt from the transcript:
As an example, IBM is frequently touted as a company that's embracing open source, when really, when you take a look at it, they're embracing Linux as a platform to show value to customers through their global services business, through their hardware business and through their proprietary software offerings. However, they don't have a roadmap to open source DB2. They don't have a roadmap to open source WebSphere. So they see a benefit for some open-source products when they don't have a strong platform or product in that space. The same can be said for Oracle; the same can be said for even a company like CA that recently has open-sourced its Ingres database. Again, they have a lot of proprietary software that they extract value from and where they don't have a great offering themselves or they want to get some level of ubiquity in the marketplace or they've end-of-lifed the product but want to make sure that customers have a roadmap — then they've chosen to open-source it.
The statement is from Martin Taylor, GM for Platform Strategy. I may not totally agree with this, but it does raises some interesting questions. If you want to have a look at the transcript, go to http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/d/4/2d4d387b-97af-4923-897d-320fe070e864/Open_Discussion_on_Windows_and_Linux_Transcript.doc . You can also download the discussion in WMV format from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d05eef30-276f-4f1e-86df-59f30a5dd72c&DisplayLang=en