Ed Scannell

While Microsoft Corp. continues raising Longhorn, rivals are seizing the operating system's extended adolescence to develop competing feature sets of their own.

The 6.1 per cent growth, a slight improvement over the five per cent growth rate expected for 2004, means the IT market will exceed US$1 trillion in overall spending.

Hoping to drive biometric devices into the mainstream, IBM Corp. on Monday unveiled its first ThinkPad that features an integrated fingerprint reader that will work in tandem with an embedded security system.

Hoping to throw some tacks in the road to slow Linux momentum, Microsoft Corp. during the next year will redouble its efforts to woo more corporate users migrating from Unix to the open source OS.

IBM Corp. will push its Power5 line of servers down into the low end of the market, taking Linux with it, when it unwraps an aggressively priced series of Linux-only systems on Monday that will go up against the offerings of Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Bolstering its lineup of remote access management offerings, 3amLabs Inc. on Thursday debuted three products including a free version of its flagship product, LogMeIn, that helps IT managers locate and manage remote access products.

Hoping to accelerate the acceptance of blade servers, IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. on Thursday revealed their jointly developed technical specifications for its BladeCenter platform that will allow developers to customize add-on products and solutions.

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday made available for download its first Service Pack for Office System 2003, which features fresh capabilities to its OneNote and InfoPath applications, along with improvements to overall speed and performance and a collection of previously announced security fixes.