When will merger mania end? First came the purchase of PalmOS vendor PalmSource by Japanese company ACCESS Co., Ltd., a company that's probably not a household name for most of us. Will this buyout have any effect on the reported upcoming move to a Linux-based OS for PalmOS PDAs and Treo smartphones? PalmSource says all is well, and everything will stay on-track for the future...we'll see. Certainly times are interesting in the troubled PDA segment, and everyone wants a piece of the growing cellphone action.

But the biggest merger news was marketplace heavyweight Oracle's buyout of enterprise software maker Siebel.

It's obvious that Oracle intends to be a powerhouse in the enterprise application market, and that SAP is squarely in its crosshairs. First PeopleSoft, now Siebel -- wow. This is turning out to be a real battle of the titans, and Oracle has a powerful hand of cards, if it can integrate and coordinate all of the pieces it's picked up over the last year. As always, time will tell. Does the merger have any impact on your enterprise development or deployment plans? Let us know,we're all ears.

The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference last week brought a slew of news from the Redmond giant. Previews of Office 12 and the next version of Windows, code-named Vista, were made by the Gates himself. See the story for details (and other Office/Vista coverage here), but one thing you won't see in Office 12, at least at present, is support for the OpenDocument standard, despite plans by the Massachusetts state government (long a Microsoft antitrust foe) to require it for future product purchases. A showdown looms -- Microsoft is lobbying hard to have the requirement rescinded, so far with little result. The lead architect of the Massachusetts open standards policy, however, is soon to leave his post, so it may be that all Microsoft has to do is wait this one out, and hope his successor is more amenable to proprietary document formats. This is a key battle -- make no mistake about it. Microsoft gets a load of cash from Office sales, and having a genuinely cross-product open document standard built into Word would erode much of the iron-clad product lock-in Microsoft currently enjoys. It is in Microsoft's best interests to keep enterprises and users locked tightly into their document standards, and thus into their products, in perpetuity. Microsoft has proven again and again it knows where its bread is buttered, and this is a battle they'll surely fight tooth and nail to win. We'll keep you in the loop about how it's going.

Other battlefronts for Microsoft include search, where it hopes a new release of APIs to developers will boost its fortunes in the search arena against market leader Google. Google looks very solid now, and has dominant market share, but Microsoft has a well-practiced strategy of hanging around until the market leader stumbles, and then taking all the marbles. They've hit the nail on the head here, though, in that you all, the developers, are key to their success or failure in this key market. Are the new APIs enough to entice you into looking at the Redmond Plan, or is Google still tops in your book? industry-trendsetter IONA's addition to the Eclipse fold. Open-source Eclipse has been gaining significant momentum as a more and more complete and cross-vendor application development framework for enterprise software development, and it's definitely worth keeping a close eye on, if you're not using it already.

And finally, all those of you who have jumped in and volunteered your time and skills, or donated money to assist Katrina victims are heroes in the truest sense of the word. We'd love to hear any stories you might want to share,,and we'll do our very best to share some of them with your peers and colleagues here. In a world of cutthroat mergers, fast-paced product cycles, and heads-down project overload, it's good to keep in mind what really, truly matters: living a good life, and helping those in need. For those of you who are still thinking about ways to help, contact your local Red Cross chapter or other relief agency -- I'm sure they'd love to hear from you, and would be thrilled to find a way for you to pitch in and help out.

Posted by Richard Hoffman at 09:56 PM | Permalink