Stories by: Jason Snyder

Long adept at staving off targeted threats to its core revenue streams, by 2013 Microsoft finally fell prey to the micromarket effect. Linux on increasingly popular UMPCs (ultramobile PCs), the rise of OpenOffice in developing nations, and the customized productivity app marketplace borne of Google's App Engine application-hosting service and its Salesforce and eBay acquisitions -- all chipped deeply enough into Microsoft's core customer base that the company finally had to loosen its grip on the computing industry's once-best legal license to print money, its Office and Windows software business.

Viewed by many as open source's most compelling business play in the past few years, MySQL made waves this year, accepting Sun Microsystems' US$1 billion acquisition bid, opening eyes on Wall Street as to open source's potential to shake up the software industry in the process.

What are the next steps needed for open source as a software production methodology to reach the next level?

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Thursday announced availability of what it is touting as the highest-capacity, highest-performing notebook hard drive. The Travelstar 7K200 doubles the capacity of its predecessor to 200GB and includes optional data encryption technology for securing notebooks at the hard drive level.

Not to be outdone by laptop rival Sony, Dell Tuesday announced the availability of SSD (solid-state drive) technology for its Latitude D420 and D620 notebooks.

Digg is just the latest in a raft of Web 2.0 darlings to open their data doors to developers by way of APIs. The Digg API -- announced Thursday at a party to celebrate Digg's 1 millionth registered user -- will allow developers to expose Digg story, comment, and user data to mashups of their own making.