Microsoft delivers record sales and earnings

Buoyed by strong sales in its consumer division, Microsoft announced record profits the the fourth quarter of 2004. The software giant says it achieved revenues of $10.8 billion for the quarter, up seven per cent on the equivalent quarter of 2003. ...more

Digital music download sales stall

Apple may be in the process of selling over 10 million iPods each month but a development that is bound to be worrying record company executives is that sales of digital music downloads have stalled. Since May the number of tracks sold, most of which are downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store, has remained almost static at around 6.5 million per week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. ...more

SCO subpoenas sally forth

Following IBM's subpoenas on the financial friends of SCO, SCO has served subpoenas to five companies and one individual: Linus Torvalds. The subpoenas are being served to Linus Torvalds, Novell, the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Development Lab and Transmeta, the company for which Linus Torvalds was working until recently. There is also one other organisation on which we are still awaiting a name. ...more

SGI feels the SCO heat

SGI has received notice from SCO that it is terminating its Unix licence due to misappropriation of Unix code. The notice came to light in an SEC filing submitted on Monday by the company that revealed SCO now sees it as the next target following its ongoing litigation with IBM. It reads: 'We recently received a notice from SCO Group stating its intention to terminate our fully paid license to certain UNIX-related code, under which we distribute our IRIX operating system, on the basis that we have breached the terms of such license. ...more

A cold wind blows through Alta Vista

It's another sign of the online times: Alta Vista, the US search engine and portal, has announced that it's cutting another 200 jobs, following other lay-offs last year. The reason given by the US company is the ongoing weakness of online advertising. The Guardian quotes Peter Mills, a company adviser, as saying: "AltaVista has not been immune to the softness in advertising". ...more