Stories by: InfoWorld staff

AT&T today ended its battle to buy T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 U.S. carrier from parent company Deutsche Telekom. In doing so, it will pay T-Mobile a $4 billion breakup fee. Earlier this fall, both the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice said they would fight the sale, with the FCC saying it was not in consumers' interest. Had the deal gone through, AT&T would have become the No. 1 U.S. cellular carrier, leaping ahead of Verizon Wireless, which it trails slightly in terms of customers.

Hailed as one of Microsoft's broadest, deepest releases, Windows Server 8 will replace the current version of the OS, Windows Server 2008, in 2012 about the same time the new companion desktop OS, Windows 8, is released. Microsoft has a broad set of goals to reach with this release, such as cloud compatibility and automation of routine tasks across multiple machines. The new release also benefits from Microsoft's work building out its own Azure cloud service. Many technologies developed for the server were tested in the cloud, and many technologies developed for Azure were then imported back to the server.

Macs may be a minority of PCs in any business, but these days they are used by most businesses. And as more companies roll out "choose your own PC" and "bring your own PC" policies, IT will only need to be more familiar with managing Mac OS X systems.

Everyone is a trend watcher. But at a certain point, to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing, you need to first take a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases.

We're back again for our annual survey of your certifiable geek cred, so dust off your pocket protector, suck face with your closest Ewok doll, and dig into your Bag of Holding to bring forth the answers to our nerdiest set of 20 questions yet. Answer enough correctly, and you may don the geek sherpa guru label, to guide the unwashed to geek heaven. Answer too many wrong, and find your inner geek flatlining.

It's not the Windows you know and love. Microsoft has revealed a "reimagined" Windows -- code-named Windows 8 -- that boasts a very different, tile-centric user interface called Metro taken from Windows Phone that is touch-savvy, runs on ARM processors as well as Intel x86 chips, takes fewer system resources so it can run on a wider variety of hardware platforms, and works on both tablets and traditional keyboard-and-mouse PCs. It's not mobile versus desktop, it's mobile and desktop together.

Zenprise on Wednesday announced that the new version of its MobileManager mobile device management (MDM) suite will include a component that lets iPad and iPhone users access Microsoft SharePoint project files and transfer them from their iOS device into a secure container. The module will honor the access policies set in SharePoint, both the on-premise and Office 365 versions, thus files can be set as read-only or uncopyable via email or transfer to other iOS apps. An Android version is planned for early 2012.

Bloomberg today is reporting that an unnamed source tells it that the Hewlett-Packard board is considering whether to fire controvesial CEO Léo Apotheker after less than a year on the job. Apotheker succeeded Mark Hurd, who was fired over an accounting-and-personnel scandaland who succeeded the controversial Carly Fiorina.

Adobe today is announcing version 5.4 of its Adobe WEM (Web Experience Management) suite of content and campaign management tools. Based on the CQ5 content management system acquired from Day last year, Adobe WEM adds a capability to automatically reformat Web pages using Adobe's Device Central technology when displayed on various mobile devices and to handle marketing campaign management across websites, social networking, and other customer conduits. The suite also integrates the user traffic and engagement tracking from Omniture SiteCatalyst, the Web tracking suite that Adobe also bought last year.

Research in Motion today released a free version of its BlackBerry Express Server (BES) for IBM Domino servers, which run Lotus Notes. The Express version allows an unlimited number of users but has a subset of the mobile management tool's policies: 75 out of the full version's more than 500 policies.