IT Week's Sideways View

A look at the week's winners and losers

Good Week
After years spent in the shadows of internet search, enterprise search is the latest hot topic. Microsoft is bidding a cool $1.2bn in cash for Fast, one of the hottest players in the sector, adding some much-needed glamour to the market for software that probes the nooks and crannies of business information assets, from old databases to that email you sent five seconds ago. Consolidation is, yet again, the name of the game, and bets are already being taken on what happens now to Autonomy, a rare contribution from the UK to the world of corporate software. Whatever happens to the boys from Cambridge though, Microsoft’s other new rivals will be familiar – say hello, yet again, to IBM and Google.

Bad Week
If HD-DVD is not already dead in the water it is doing a world-class impersonation of a floating corpse. After Warner Brothers walked away, Paramount last week trod the same path to leave HD-DVD looking as attractive as a boxed Beta-Max VCR for Christmas. Having the backing of Hollywood makes Blu-Ray a more handsome suitor for everyone as the certainty of volume production creates economies of scale. However, HD-DVD supporters may take succour in the schadenfreude-tinted thought that even VHS did not stick around forever. Indeed, Blu-Ray may be the last of the big storage media formats as cloud-based provisioning and backup takes over.

Word of the Week
Gestures. They used to have unfortunate associations with rudeness but gestures are being rehabilitated quickly in the post-iPhone world. Microsoft plans to weave touch and gestures into the fabric of Windows Mobile 7, and, at CES, Bill Gates even acknowledged that Apple did something right to change the look, or rather the feel, of the GUI.