7 days - Week in Review

In a year's time the electronics and engineering colossus General Electric plans to have spent the lion's share of its $550 million (#330m) millennium budget.

The size of the budget was revealed in General Electric's filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week. The company said the bug might still hit its operations by disrupting the transport or utility services - but that it could not estimate the likelihood or scale of impact.

In contrast, Taskforce 2000 director Ian Hugo had no trouble in assessing the risk of millennium timebomb explosions at nine UK government departments as 'high.' The man the government overlooked when it recruited a chief for its Action2000 body rounded on the DTI, the Foreign and Home Offices, the Ministry of Defence, and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) - among others. Taskforce 2000 said the NIO could not be trusted to judge its own millennium-readiness: 'We would recommend an external audit.' Meanwhile the Audit Commission promised that next spring it will begin naming and shaming local government millennium laggards.

Bill Gates delivered the keynote address at Comdex Fall in Las Vegas.

Without once saying the letters 'D', 'O' or 'J,' the godfather of the PC software industry delivered a speech about how sad it is that the DoJ doesn't recognise Microsoft as the innovator and industry driver it is.

Oracle chief Larry Ellison used Comdex to unveil Stage Two of his plan to steal Gates' throne. Stage one was the launch of the network computer in 1996, which only has 14 months left to fulfil Ellison's prediction that by 2000 it would replace the trusty PC and become as commonplace as the telephone. Ellison is pressing ahead with Stage two - the launch of server hardware to run Oracle's newly-launched 8i database. He called System 10 from Apple, where he is a board member, 'a wonderful candidate operating system.' Other candidates are FreeBSD, NetBSD, Sun's Solaris, and Linux. Hardware could come from Compaq, HP, Dell or Sun.

An upgrade from Linux promised to boost the freeware operating system's scalability across multiprocessor boxes. The Be operating system Apple once thought of buying received a boost from Intel, which invested an unnamed amount of money in the company. The move took some of the gloss off the investment Intel made in Linux specialist Red Hat last month.

Intel's investment in Be could have been tit-for-tat with Microsoft.

The software giant put its Chromeffects multimedia technology on indefinite hold last week - software which would have been a a major driver for sales of Intel's PII processor. The move came in the same week that Intel executive vice president Steve McGeady testified against Microsoft. McGeady - a 'prima donna' according to opposing lawyers - sang in court about Microsoft's alleged threats to drop support for Intel's Merced and MMX extension, unless Intel backed out of a competing software project.

Corel promised to join the application-sharing battle being fought by Microsoft and Citrix. Unlike Microsoft, it will not licence and rename Citrix code, but is instead developing 'jBridge' Java code. That will be delivered next year and will allow server-based Windows applications to be delivered to any client running a Java virtual machine.

The Access database was taken off death row - where it was put by media reports that it will be replaced by SQL Server in the Office 2000 application database. Microsoft admitted that Office 2000 will offer the newly-developed Microsoft Data Engine, but said it will also feature Access.

The data engine apparently is not a scaled-down version of SQL Server, even though applications can be scaled 'transparently' from MSDE to SQL Server. It's just 'compatible with a similar component architecture'.

So there!