PC Pro's review of 2007: January - June

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Dec 2007 at 18:10

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 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.