1. "Steve Case: Break Up Time Warner, Free AOL," InfoWorld, 12/12. The co-founder of America Online admitted publicly what most folks have known for a long time: the merger of AOL and Time Warner was a major misstep. Steve Case was one of the prime movers for the merger, but now says the tie-up has hurt both entities and AOL should be set free. In fact, he proposed to the company board that they split up Time Warner into four separate entities, one of which would be AOL.

2. "Visto Sues Microsoft Over Patents," PC World, 12/15. Yet another battle in the wireless e-mail market as Visto filed suit against Gates Inc. accusing Microsoft of improper use of patented Visto technologies in Windows Mobile 5.0. The case joins the bitter struggle between Research in Motion and NTP over RIM allegedly using NTP patents illegally in its BlackBerry e-mail devices. Visto is seeking unspecified monetary damages as well as a permanent injunction on Microsoft shipping Windows Mobile 5.0. Microsoft has yet to respond to the suit.

3. "Microsoft Windows Earns Common Criteria Certification," Network World, 12/14. Gates Inc. had something to celebrate as some of its software achieved Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, a certification evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership. The rating which goes up to EAL 7 is used by government customers to determine the security of IT products. Traditionally, government customers have opted for Unix because of its tendency to be extremely secure and more recently they’ve begun to adopt Linux too.

4. "Google, Microsoft, Sun To Fund New Research Lab," San Jose Mercury News, 12/15. Putting aside their rivalries for once, the trio of IT titans are teaming up to fund research at a new University of California Berkeley lab. Each company has pledged US$500,000 over the next five years to help the efforts of the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Lab or RADLab for short. The lab will explore different methods of software engineering and will make any technologies it develops freely available.

5. "Oracle: Now For The Hard Part," BusinessWeek, 12/16. Oracle pronounced itself happy with its second-quarter financial results released this week and claimed that the customers it gained through its PeopleSoft acquisition are happy too. However, financial analysts still aren’t convinced that Oracle’s software purchases are going to pay off in the long term. How successful Oracle will be in bringing together the disparate software pieces it bought with its existing applications in its ambitious Project Fusion won’t be known for at least a year. In the meantime, customers may well defect to rival SAP or other players.