Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft‘s week could be described in one word: litigious. The ongoing patent-infringement battle against i4i, the small Canadian company that argued successfully before an East Texas court that Microsoft Word violated its X M L-related patent, entered yet another round on Sept. 8. On that date, i4i submitted a responding brief to Microsoft’s recent appeal. […]

When did you last purchase a device that performed just one primary function? Purchasers of Amazon’s Kindle line, a Flip digital video recorder, an e-reader or a digital music player manufactured by a company such as Sony could probably answer “yesterday.” But as Apple‘s Sept. 9 event in San Francisco demonstrated, the era in which […]

Microsoft and Yahoo’s partnership deal over Internet search will be examined more deeply by the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure that the agreement falls within the boundaries of antitrust laws. Microsoft confirmed that the Justice Department was indeed seeking more information, but was expectedly tight-lipped about details. “As expected, Microsoft and Yahoo have received […]

At least one rumor panned out during Apple‘s Sept. 9 event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Steve Jobs, looking thin after months on medical leave, took to the stage to introduce a range of new products. “I now have the liver of a kid in his 20s who died in a […]

Microsoft finally received some good news in one of its high-profile legal battles on Sept. 11, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington overturning a $358 million judgment leveled against the software maker in a patent infringement case involving Alcatel-Lucent. The original verdict, which found that Microsoft Outlook violated Alcatel-Lucent’s […]

Microsoft licensing is likely to remain “unwieldy” in the near future, although solutions to licensing issues do exist, according to a new research note by two analysts linked to Directions on Microsoft, an independent organization that tracks the company. The Sept. 8 research note by Rob Horwitz, CEO and founder of Directions on Microsoft, and […]

Microsoft has released the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, a “solution accelerator” that supports IT administrators in their deployment of not only the upcoming Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but also Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Although the original Release Candidate build for the Toolkit rolled out in […]

Sprint announced its “Any Mobile, Anytime” feature, allowing unlimited calls between its customers’ mobile devices and other U.S. carriers’ mobile devices, on Sept. 10. The “Any Mobile, Anytime” feature, married to the company’s Everything Data plan, also includes unlimited messaging and data. Those plans start at $69.99. “We don’t think our customers want to have […]

Microsoft filed a brief on Sept. 8 objecting to the controversial Google Book Search deal, arguing that Google’s settlement with authors and publishers has the potential to violate antitrust laws. “The proposed settlement…confers on Google a new monopoly by authorizing Google (and Google alone) to engage in the wholesale commercial exploitation of entire copyrighted books,” […]

Salesforce.com announced the rollout of Service Cloud 2, the update to its Service Cloud originally released in January, on Sept. 9. This new version includes three new features designed to leverage SAAS (software-as-a-service) capabilities to customer-service interactions for both the enterprise and SMBs (small and midsize businesses). The first new feature, called Salesforce Knowledge, has […]

Microsoft finds itself embroiled in yet another round of the patent-infringement case leveled against it by Canadian company i4i, which submitted a responding brief on Sept. 8 rebutting Microsoft’s recent appeal. In a statement following filing of the responding brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, i4i chairman Loudon Owen said […]

Apple may be having technical difficulties with its upcoming generation of iPods, according to a number of online sources. The issue in question centers on the cameras allegedly being integrated into the media-player devices. Sources trusted by both AppleInsider and Hardmac apparently told the sites that problems had developed with the camera modules, but further […]