Apple Must Pay Ebook Buyers After Losing Antitrust Case Appeal

Today’s topics include Apple having to pay hundreds of millions in fines, a new add-on from Microsoft, bold claims from a new study on Google and Windows 10 finally integrating with Cortana.

Apple must pay consumers a total of $450 million in damages after the company lost an appeal of a 2013 court decision, which found that Apple illegally conspired with ebook publishers to raise prices, starting in 2010.

In the latest legal round in the price-fixing case, a three-judge panel in the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan issued a 2-to-1 ruling that upholds an earlier lower court ruling, which found that Apple violated U.S. civil antitrust rules in taking its alleged actions on ebook prices.

Microsoft is connecting customers of its System Center data center management platform to their cloud workloads with a new add-on. Yesterday’s release of the Operations Management Suite (OMS) add-on for System Center brings IT monitoring, automation and data protection capabilities to System Center.

Announced in May at the Ignite conference in Chicago, OMS is a “hybrid management solution that extends the value of System Center and helps you manage your corporate workloads, no matter where they run—Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, or OpenStack,” explained Guru Pangal, general manager of Hybrid Storage at Microsoft, in a statement.

Google recently dismissed a study, which two academic researchers conducted and Yelp sponsored, that claims the company is deliberately degrading search engine results in order to favor its own content over that of rivals.

At issue is the method Google uses to display results when users search for certain items, especially those involving specialized content or local content.

The researchers said their study shows that Google self-promotes its own content while deliberately downplaying the more organic results generated by its merit-based search algorithms.

The latest preview build of Windows 10 finally integrates Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri, with Office 365. Weeks before Windows 10’s official release, Microsoft has pushed out another test build (number 10158) that allows its virtual assistant to access—and act upon—Office content.

“With this build, you’ll be able to try out the Cortana integration with Office 365 if your company is opted into First Release for Office 365,” announced Microsoft General Manager Gabriel Aul in a June 29 statement.