Stories by: Jason Snyder

Long adept at staving off targeted threats to its core revenue streams, by 2013 Microsoft finally fell prey to the micromarket effect. Linux on increasingly popular UMPCs (ultramobile PCs), the rise of OpenOffice in developing nations, and the customized productivity app marketplace borne of Google's App Engine application-hosting service and its Salesforce and eBay acquisitions -- all chipped deeply enough into Microsoft's core customer base that the company finally had to loosen its grip on the computing industry's once-best legal license to print money, its Office and Windows software business.

Fulfilling the demand for broadband to millions of users across the globe takes more than just ingenuity, it takes energy -- lots of it. Accounting for nearly 1 per cent of total power consumption in the UK alone, BT Group was faced with a dilemma: how to scale and roll out new services to take advantage of new market opportunities without overburdening its energy budget -- and the climate.

As senior director of platform technology at Microsoft, Sam Ramji is positioned uniquely at the nexus of proprietary and open source development models. Here's how Ramji sees open source and proprietary development models evolving.

Digg is just the latest in a raft of Web 2.0 darlings to open their data doors to developers by way of APIs. The Digg API -- announced Thursday at a party to celebrate Digg's 1 millionth registered user -- will allow developers to expose Digg story, comment, and user data to mashups of their own making.

Fast, cheap and all over the place. That's how technology experts behind Microsoft's fast-growing Live offerings envision the future of the enterprise data centre in a Web 2.0 driven world.