News 

January

January began with a bang with the launch of Vista. Five years in the making and at a cost of $6 billion, Microsoft would unsurprisingly go on to proclaim the launch a resounding success, but the year would prove to be a difficult one for both Microsoft and its embattled operating system with performance, sales and security all coming under the microscope at some point.

Less glitzy, but arguably more important, the XO also popped its head up in January, still labelled the $100 laptop. Like Microsoft, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was also blissfully unaware of how difficult a year 2007 would prove to be as manufacturing delays and shortages quickly drove the price up on its laptop for developing nations.

February

February saw Michael Dell return as CEO to the company he created, signalling a sizeable shift in direction for the ailing PC manufacturer which would spend the year broadening its product line and signing deals with High Street retailers, as it sought to move away from the direct sales model it pioneered and which many believed to be at the root of its troubles.

February also saw Intel open its new 45nm fab plant in New Mexico, an astounding achievement given that AMD had only just shifted to 65nm production. It was to be the story of AMD's year, as it struggled to keep pace with the chip giant that it had stung out of lethargy with its Athlon series of processors.

March

March brought warnings that uptake of new on-demand TV services might be hindered by ISPs throttling bandwidth, an issue that would continue to rumble throughout the year as customers woke up to the fact that advertised broadband speeds had little to do with actual speeds, and that not much was being done about it.

February also saw the EU awake from its winter hibernation to threaten Microsoft with heavy fines over its refusal to comply with the 2004 ruling that it disclose server information

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to competitors. It was a fight that would last the rest of the year, but which, after argument and counter-argument, the EU would ultimately win.

April

April brought bad news for the search giants, with Yahoo sued by the family of a Chinese dissident it helped to jail, the first round of which would swiftly turn into a public and political mess for the company, which come Christmas it would still be trying to extricate itself from.

Google would also have cause to remember April, as its proposed acquisition of advertising giant DoubleClick ran into the first of a number of roadblocks, which would continue to delay the closing of the deal into 2008.

May

Open-source developers became a target for Microsoft in May as the software giant claimed that open-source software infringed 235 of its patents, not that it had any intention of naming which ones.

It was to be the first salvo of a concerted attack on the open-source community, which would result in the software giant signing software deals with a series of Linux distributors, including Novell. One notable absentee, however, was Red Hat which would swiftly find itself the sole focus of Microsoft's assault.

There was some good news for open source though, with Dell announcing that it was to start offering Ubuntu-loaded PCs to its customers, prompting some watchers to question whether this was to be the year Linux finally found traction in the mainstream market.

June

June saw Google complete its clean sweep of record labels by signing with EMI to allow YouTube users to play its music. It was a notable success for the company, which had been struggling with piracy charges since taking over the wildly popular video sharing site. Unfortunately, the issues of video piracy refused to be so easily fixed, despite Google developing some clever new anti-piracy technology.

Google continued to dominate headlines in June by admitting it could be in trouble if users lost confidence in its privacy controls. The comments foreshadowed a privacy arms race which saw all the major search companies reduce the amount of time they held personal data on users to 18 months, leading Ask to up the ante by offering its customers the option of deleting all their search queries.

Click here to read the concluding part of our 2007 news round-up covering July to December.