IT Week's Sideways View

Good Week
The significant others of executives of publicly quoted enterprise software companies, especially in business intelligence, were given the mouth-watering prospect of big payday after Cognos finally laid down and whispered “take me, darling, take me for $5bn” to IBM. Following on within weeks of SAP’s $6.7bn agreement to buy Business Objects, and coming in the same year as Oracle’s $3.3bn deal to buy Hyperion, the sale could hasten the acquisition of others in the sector, although the biggest of the willing suitors have now left the dance floor. As for privately held wallflowers, such as SAS Institute and Information Builders, now they really will stand out from the crowd.

Bad Week
The police will certainly be kept busy with incidents to investigate, or at least report, as Apple’s iPhone finally lands in the hands of the UK’s coolest buyers. Today’s thieves are brand specifiers. They already target high-end products and, just as with the iPod, the iPhone presents them with a new gold standard. The iPod’s distinctive (at the time) white earphones made them an obvious target, and the pinch-and-touch nature of the iPhone will also make users stand out in a crowd. For them, and officers inundated with theft reports, it’s going to be tough on those streets. Mind how you go now, as Dixon of Dock Green used to say.

Word of the Week
Hyper-V. Is it pronounced “Hi, PERVY!” or “HYper-V”? Either way, Microsoft’s new name for its virtualisation hypervisor is not nearly as nice as its gorgeous codename Viridian. Not since IBM called its “Butterfly” ThinkPad the 701C has a name change been so brutal.

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