Year in review: Not surviving but thriving
Even with one arm tied behind its back, Microsoft proved once again that it never backs down from a fight.
| | |||||||||||||||||||||||
An appeals court agrees that the company is a monopolist, but sends an order to break up the software giant back to a lower court. Part of the reason: the trial judge "seriously tainted the proceedings."
Nine states and the District of Columbia file a remedy proposal that could upset the momentum of a settlement hammered out between Microsoft, the Justice Department and nine other states.
The company reaches an agreement that would dismiss more than 100 pending private antitrust cases by donating software, services, training and software licenses for reconditioned computers.
Entering a video game market dominated by major contenders, Microsoft's powerful hammer--Windows--is of little use. But like Mario and Luigi, the software giant has a few not-so-secret weapons.
You may buy Windows XP because it offers nifty tricks for editing photos and music. Microsoft surely wants the revenue, but has much grander ambitions for its latest OS. Can you say dot-Net?
While network administrators wait and prepare for another round of attacks from the Code Red worm, the software giant is drawing much of the blame for the pernicious infection.
An employee makes an error and attackers exploit the weakness to extend the outage several days. Not a good week for a company that just launched an ad campaign with the slogan "software for the agile business."
Microsoft contritely acknowledges that its second attempt to fix an Exchange security hole went awry. The second attempt at a software patch included a catastrophic bug that caused many servers to hang.