Joris Evers

Vendors of wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment must work much harder to make their products more user friendly and to improve security features, a former Intel Corp. executive said Wednesday.

Microsoft Corp. has appointed a senior executive to a new position in Europe to improve relationships with governments across the continent, a move apparently designed to counter interest in open source software there.

Microsoft Corp. is retiring its six-year-old NetMeeting online conferencing application and instead will push Office Live Meeting, formerly known as PlaceWare, for online meetings.

Microsoft Corp. is investigating a potential security issue with Exchange Server 2003, which would be the first since the e-mail server was launched last month.

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T Corp. has sued eBay Inc. and its PayPal Inc. unit alleging that the payment systems the companies use infringe on an AT&T patent.

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to pay as much as US$18.33 million to settle class action lawsuits in North Dakota and South Dakota that alleged the vendor overcharged for its software.

Skepticism about what IT promises to deliver is fine, but businesses should not become complacent about IT, vendor executives and Nicholas Carr, author of

Twenty years on from his first address at Comdex, Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates this year used his keynote speech to reminisce and found that some software challenges from the 1980s still exist. He also announced new technologies to solve some of today's problems.