Coop's Scoop: The week ahead, the week that was

Tuesday marks the final showdown between Microsoft and the government in Judge Jackson's Washington, D.C., courtroom. Don't expect any surprises in this oral-argument phase of the trial, with lawyers for each looking to convince the judge that God is on its side. The real news is what's happening -- or not happening -- back in Chicago, where mediator Richard Posner is trying to bridge the gaps between the protagonists.

Sun Microsystems is looking to sell a new motto, "Build for the Dot.com Age." The suits are expected to have more to say about that later in the week.

Ralph Kramden, where are you when we need you? He would be in his element when FMI 2000 -- billed as the world's largest supermarket technology show -- gets under way in San Francisco. There may be cross-town competition for reporters' attention when suits from the real estate and tech fields also gather in Baghdad by the Bay for a three-day conference about how new technology will affect the real estate industry.

Palm Computing, soon to be Palm Inc., will launch its color Palm handheld. The device, to be called Palm IIIc ("c" for color), will offer a color screen in a package similar to a regular, monochrome Palm III device. The price? Somewhere around $400.

HP, a la Compaq's iPaq, this week will officially announce its e-PC "PC appliance" aimed at corporations. The e-PC, according to HP, will be a slimmed down version of a PC that will allow corporate weenies to complete their task at hand by accessing e-services, such as hosted applications.

That VIA Technologies Inc. isn't afraid of Intel we all know. The company, which fought back against Intel this week in court, will fight back next week in the marketplace with a new low-cost processor. The chip, code-named Joshua, is based on technology acquired through the company's purchase of Cyrix Corp. from National Semiconductor last year. Joshua will be available at launch with 433MHz and 466MHz equivalents. More interestingly, however, it will fit into -- you guessed it -- Intel's Socket 370, a 370-pin socket used for its Celeron and some Pentium III processors.

And don't forget the Big Mama trade show of them all, CeBIT, which gets under way in Germany.

The week that was
I feel so much better now that Mr. Bill (the one in Washington, D.C., not Redmond, Washington) has exchanged views with sundry wise men of the computer industry about what to do about hack attacks.

Noticeably absent from Bill Gates' Windows 2000 launch speech was the nugget -- courtesy of GartnerGroup -- that corporate customers will wind up paying thousands of dollars in extra licensing fees. But here's the part that could well attract special attention from Microsoft's friends at the Justice Department: Gartner maintains that even offices that are not complete Windows software shops are likely to get hit because of Microsoft's expanded terms and conditions. This sort of high-handed approach to DOS licensing got MS into hot water in the mid-1990s. Bad timing, to be sure, by the sales and marketing geniuses responsible for the product launch. Meanwhile, Gartner's message is to check out Solaris and Linux. That's a boilerplate suggestion; the high costs of conversion will likely outweigh the higher licensing fees. So much for negotiating leverage.

Speaking of throwbacks, the spat between Intel and VIA over patent infringement brings to mind the long-running legal battle Intel carried on with AMD for a good part of the last decade. Are you getting as sick of these lawsuits as I am? Enough with the lawyers: Battle it out in the marketplace.

Wall Street has lots of reasons to love HP's Carly Fiorina. Unlike certain bloviating CEOs making the television rounds, she offers real, no-BS answers to knotty questions. And she's gotten results -- no small achievement at a multibillion-dollar company with a legacy that dates back to the founding of Silicon Valley.

I'll await the results of the FTC probe into whether DoubleClick engaged in unfair or deceptive practices, but methinks DoubleClick President Kevin Ryan protests too much. "DoubleClick has never and will never use sensitive online data in our profiles," he said. Yet the company was all set to roll out a program that would have tracked Internet users' movements on the Web, feeding that into a database with people's real names and addresses. Hmm.

As for the report that the Internet encourages feelings of isolation, talk with somebody else; I've got another couple of hours of Web surfing before it's lights-out time.

In the news
Win2000: Behind the scenes
MS on 'open Windows': Baloney!
Macworld Tokyo: Up with products
DoubleClick defends practices
AMD crashes Intel desert-fest
Symbian to unveil multimedia cell phones
Clinton opposes Net access taxes
Linux: Itanium's great 64-bit hope?
The Net: Ultimate isolating technology?
Woman.com closes online boutique
Wall Street loves HP's Fiorina