YEAR IN REVIEW: April 2010

ComputerWorld Canada staff

14 years ago

April 2010 started with some legal news as Quebec’s appeal court authorized a class-action against telecommunications provider Telus Corp. for allegedly illegally collecting roaming fees from customers when their phone signals strayed across the border to the U.S.

The i4i Inc. saga continues when Microsoft Corp. was denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals a request for an en banc hearing after a three-judge panel upheld a $240-million judgment against the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant over custom XML technology in Microsoft Word.

At long last, Apple Inc. releases the much-awaited iPad tablet, a handheld device for viewing movies, surf the Web, read e-books and play games. And so a debate starts: is it a smart phone or a mini laptop? A few days later, Apple announced it would preview the next-generation iPhone operating system at an invitation-only event.

Rumours spread that Hewlett-Packard Co., not to be outdone, has its own tablet, the HP Slate, set to come out amid the buzz and hype of Apple’s iPad.

Software companies are still feeling the recession, evidenced by CA Technologies Inc. announcing plans to lay off 1,000 jobs, amounting to 7.7 per cent of its workforce. The news came one month after acquiring IT performance monitoring vendor Nimsoft for US$350 million.

CATA Alliance blasts the Conservative government’s plans for a policy paper to help build a digital economy. While such a public consultation is great for starting a discussion, it doesn’t exactly resolve specific issues such as accountability, budget, net neutrality and rural broadband expansion, the Ottawa-based organization insisted.

Newly minted eHealth Ontario CEO Greg Reed starts his job by detailing plans to improve the organization’s public image and strategies to engage IT partners.

Canadian James Gosling, otherwise known as the Father of Java, resigned Oracle Corp. less than a month after stressing the importance of Java to the company that now stewards it. Later in April, Oracle chief architect unveiled the MySQL roadmap along with a necessary reassuring message to users: MySQL matters to Oracle.

Reports start to surface that Palm Inc., owner of the Pre smart phone, is up for sale after a financial rollercoaster of a year. Soon after, HP announces plans to bail out the struggling phone maker for US$1.2 billion.

Chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission called for changes to the foreign ownership limits on Canadian telcos that would prevent foreign companies from owning more than 49 per cent of voting shares of Canadian carriers.

Yet two new entrants in the Canadian wireless space, Public Mobile and Globalive, support more foreign investment in Canadian telcos, saying it makes it easier for entrants to raise money and compete with incumbents. Canadian privacy commissioner teams up with nine privacy watchdogs around the globe to send a scathing open letter to Google Inc. over what they feel are irresponsible privacy values.

A new report, the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIRv8), finds Canada is well below the global malware infection rate.

Terry Childs, former City of San Francisco network admin, is found guilty following an arrest in July 2008 for allegedly locking up access to the city’s FiberWAN network by resetting admin passwords to switches and routers.