Day: Tuesday 21 December 2004
December seems to be the month for high-profile corporate takeovers in the IT world!
A couple of weeks back IBM sold its PC business.
Then last week Microsoft bought an anti-spyware company.
Now I’ve read that Symantec and Veritas are to merge in a $13.5bn deal.
I regularly recommend Veritas’ BackupExec suite of products to corporate clients because it is so well integrated with the Microsoft platform – indeed, the Backup utility for Windows (NTBackup) is actually a cut-down version of BackupExec. Let’s just hope that the new company will be as quick to embrace new Microsoft technologies as Veritas has been in the past.
Back in August I posted a blog entry about the what you should know about spyware article on the Microsoft website. The article has since been replaced but I was interested to read about Microsoft’s purchase of Giant Company – a leading provider of anti-spyware and anti-spam software.
Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows includes some information on Giant AntiSpyware as well as comment on Microsoft’s plans for the product, but this is the clearest indication yet as to how Microsoft is planning to integrate anti-spyware capabilities into Windows – something that some industry commentators criticised Windows XP Service Pack 2 for not addressing.