YEAR IN REVIEW: August 2009

After a Texas jury ordered Microsoft to pay i4i US$200 million for patent infringement, a Texas federal court ordered Microsoft to stop selling editions of Word and Office containing customer XML pending a final decision on the ongoing patent challenge launched by the Toronto software company. Microsoft announced plans to appeal the verdict.

 

LM Ericsson’s purchase of Nortel Networks Corp. carrier wireless unit for $1.1 billion was approved in July, but concern expressed by Research in Motion Ltd. led to an emergency hearing in Canadian parliament. Foreign aspects of the sale and Nortel’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) patents went under scrutiny.

Canada became recognized as the first country in the world to issue legally binding recommendations to Facebook Inc. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner released a 113-page report following a 14-month investigation into Facebook’s compliance with Canadian federal privacy law. The two sides reached an agreement after Facebook indicated it would adapt its privacy policies and practices over the next 12 months.

Palm Inc.’s Palm Pre smartphone, rumoured to be the main competitor to the iPhone, was officially released in Canada through Bell Mobility. Bell also made the news following a ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which favoured Bell and upset ISPs.

Microsoft entered an alliance with Nokia to build a mobile version of Office for the Symbian operating system and unveiled its future roadmap for Office, including plans to release Outlook for Mac in 2010.

Microsoft also released technology previews of SQL Azure (the database for its Azure cloud infrastructure platform), SQL Server StreamInsight and a SQL Server driver that provides Azure support for PHP.

 

AMD Inc. announced an ultra-low power version of its Instanbul Opteron chip, following the release of the six-core Opteron SE and Opteron HE processors in July. VMware Inc. opened the sixth annual VMworld conference with a free beta virtualization tool for small and medium-sized businesses.  
 

Snow Leopard, Apple Inc.¹s new Mac OS X operating system with built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, started shipping at the end of the month.  

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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