James Niccolai

Microsoft Corp. has pushed back the release date for a major upgrade to its database and developer tools to the first half of 2005, a delay of as much as six months, the company said Wednesday.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to offer subscription pricing for more of its products as part of an effort to ensure a steadier flow of revenue into the company, Sun executives said this week.

Sun Microsystems Inc. shed some more light on its UltraSparc roadmap Wednesday, outlining plans for two new processor families that will use multithreading techniques to boost the performance of Sun's servers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to acquire Kealia Inc., a privately held server design company based in California, and in the process is rehiring one of Sun's cofounders to help design the company's high-volume servers, Sun announced Tuesday.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has released a beta version of the next release of Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), a set of specifications used to develop Java applications primarily for desktop computers.

As expected, the Eclipse open source tools project founded by IBM Corp. announced this week that it has been reorganized into a not-for-profit corporation and named the first members of its new board of directors.

Oracle Corp. has announced a price cut for a lower-end version of its database, part of an effort to lure potential midsize market customers, the company said during a teleconference Wednesday.

Sun Microsystems Inc. says its Jxta technology for peer-to-peer computing is gathering steam and may soon make its way into some of its own products.