Week in Review: Can Steve Ballmer stand the heat?

Ballmer goes in alone at Microsoft

Bill Gates is gone and Steve Ballmer finally gets to lead Microsoft on his own, but he is facing a difficult time in the face of the failed attempt to buy Yahoo, which in the end actually resulted in driving the search company towards the waiting arms of Google. Another problem he has to deal with is the lack of enthusiasm that many users have about its new operating system – Windows Vista. Now Ballmer has to carry Microsoft’s mighty weight on his shoulders without the support of his old friend.

Google ordered to hand over YouTube logs

Some major privacy issues here, as a US court orders Google to hand over information on any users who have ever viewed a video on YouTube to the media company Viacom. It is the next stage in a billion dollar lawsuit against Google which alleges copyright infringement, as it has been showing clips from the company’s shows and movies. Observers have said the ruling was potentially unlawful because the log data contained personally identifiable data.

Regulation needed for next-gen networks, says Ofcom

Ofcom has urged UK telcos to speed the rolling out of next-generation superfast broadband networks. Broadband connections in the UK still lag behind man other countries, and the Government has made it clear that it sees fast connections as vital for the UK’s productivity. It says it knew that building new infrastructure would be riskier than developing on existing infrastructure, but thought it was a good sign that operators were still continuing to invest in the future.

Firefox gets its Guinness World Records

The eight million downloads of Firefox 3 has pretty much won Mozilla the Guinness World Record - although admittedly there was no record to beat. It still looks like an impressive achievement for Internet Explorer’s biggest rival when it comes to PC web browsers. It is hoping into to eat into IE’s big market share when it comes to web browsers and may well achieve this considering the next big upgrade to IE will be later this summer.

OCZ smashes solid state barrier

Very interesting storage news, as solid state drives make another step towards mainstream acceptance as OCZ cuts prices of its new products drastically, with some coming at less than half the price per GB compared to it competitors. However, some analysts have added a note of caution in that the cheaper prices may be due to the company employing a lower quality of technology which makes the drives cheaper to manufacture but more susceptible to error.

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