Week in review

The software iron curtain was yanked down this week by the US government, when it ended tight controls on mass export of strong encryption.

In a statement, the White House said encryption products of any key length may be exported without licence to any country - except seven 'terrorist' states.

US vendors have previously been forbidden from exporting encryption software stronger than 56-bits in length without a special government licence.

The new policy comes into effect on 15 December, and means European organisations can buy powerful off-the-shelf encryption products previously only available to US rivals.

The US government's decision came as analyst IDC predicted the volume of Internet-based transactions will reach $1.3 trillion (£812.5bn) by 2002. Andersen Consulting, in its latest report eEurope Takes Off, says a key concern among business executives is whether the technology is mature or transactions secure.

UK politicians and industry regulators met to discuss how the country's technology infrastructure could better support ecommerce. The European Informatics Market (Eurim), a cross-party parliament/industry group, told telecoms regulator Oftel that leased lines are too expensive, and high call charges are deterring online shoppers. Eurim also claims rival telcos are failing to adequately undercut BT's prices.

Interactive digital TV was formally born this week. Open, from British Interactive Broadcasting, whose backers include high street bank HSBC, launched its UK service. HSBC customers can now check their bank balance via their TV, and backers say TV will be more popular for accessing online services than the PC because it is more user friendly.

Linux, the open source Unix flavour, celebrated its eighth birthday.

Version 0.01 of the operating system was born into immediate obscurity on 17 September 1991, but is today the toast of the IT industry, with support from heavyweight vendors.

The Monterey camp claimed a success in its operating system work. Monterey is the project to build 64-bit Unix on Intel, and developers claimed to have successfully booted the operating system on Intel's Merced chip without using a software emulator.

Core Monterey backers are IBM, SCO and Sequent, with the group pipping rivals Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, who are also working on separate 64-bit Unix. Sun recently demonstrated its version, but used a software emulator to boot the system.

Ray Lane, Oracle chief operating officer, furthered its rivalry with Microsoft. Lane said he wants to drop Windows NT as one of the company's primary development platforms in favour of beefed-up support for Unix.

Lane said Unix had enjoyed a resurgence in sales, so Oracle needed to ask if it was worth developing for NT. "To port to NT is going to be less important for us," he claimed.

Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief executive, said his company must improve server application technologies in Windows NT and the forthcoming Windows 2000. In a video-taped speech beamed to developers across 32 US cities attending the company's Developer Days event, Gates said Microsoft would release AppCenter Server in mid-2000. He claimed this will offer simpler administration, unlimited clustering capacity and give 'bullet-proof' fault tolerance.

Meanwhile, parties in the long-running Microsoft anti-trust case presented their closing arguments to US district judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

The judge limited closing arguments to just - just - two and a half hours each.

But Microsoft may not be out of the woods yet, as the French government revealed it was investigating its own anti-trust action against the software giant. Government investigators are following up complaints from consumers that it is impossible to buy a PC without Windows 98 software pre-installed.

And finally, Ovum advised against rushing into customer relationship management (CRM). In its latest report, CRM Strategies: Technology Choices for the Customer Focused, Ovum says CRM projects are made difficult because of the need to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with newer CRM tools.

Ovum said only organisations with potentially large budgets should implement CRM, but everyone else should wait until integrated software is developed.

That means waiting for 12 months, or until there is consolidation among CRM and ERP players or for ERP companies such as SAP to develop CRM suites.