On June 7th, 2004, Dolmen acquired JCS NV from Bureau van Dijk Computer Services NV and thus became the Belgian market leader in Java & J2EE services. Dolmen is also one of the market leaders in Microsoft applications and products such as SharePoint Portal, is a Suse Linux Business Partner, and is also successful in legacy application development. JCS was founded in 1998 by Stephan Janssen with a clear focus on Java and J2EE development. At this moment, JCS employs 23 people.
Read more at http://www.dolmen.be/EN/Pers/Dolmen+takes+over+JConsults+International+NV.htm.
Late 2003, Microsoft approached SAP to discuss the idea of a merger. After buying Great Plains and Navision, this would have been Microsoft's third and probably most successful attempt to get a substantial part of the business software market.
However, the discussions were ended by Microsoft due to the complexity of the deal and the subsequent integration. Read more at e.g. http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/07/HNmssap_1.html.
Imagine what such a deal would have meant for the application market. In one of the previous Eye on IT newsletters, we noted that the strategy of SAP to either go for Java/J2EE or to embrace .NET would be very important for the success of J2EE. An acquisition of SAP would have been a massive win for .NET, and a major blow to IBM's BCS, which gets a lot of revenue from SAP projects and implementation.
Just recently, SAP announced deals with both IBM (boosting joint sales to large customers) and Microsoft (boosting Web services) in 2 simultaneous press releases at Sapphire '04. It looks like SAP wants to remain a friend of both, instead of being tied too tightly to any one of them.
ADDED June 09, 2004: Forbes asked Goldman Sachs what they thought about this, and their answers were somewhat surprising to me: a) the DoJ would not even have tried to prevent this merger because Microsoft is officially not in the enterprise software market; b) Microsoft will not attempt another acquisition soon because it cannot afford to "tick off the big gorilla" (SAP) because they need them to support .NET; and c) there is "a big, big battle" brewing for Microsoft and its .NET platform against "the Java camp" with IBM, BEA, and Oracle, but you probably already knew this. Read these comments at http://www.forbes.com/markets/2004/06/09/0609automarketscan04.html.
At AnchorDesk, Rafe Needleman wrote down what we think about DidTheyReadIt, a brandnew service that allows email senders to see when the recipient reads the message, on what computer, ... (other examples of such privacy-invading services are ReadNotify and MsgTag).
DidTheyReadIt does this by using a small embedded image - whose access is traced back to the DidTheyReadIt servers - in the emails you send via them. While Web-based and text-based email clients have the possibility to limit the use of these "beacons", Office 2003 also offers the feature to turn off the automatic download of images in email. For all others, there is the option to run mail filters that e.g. color such email messages to see who is bugging you, or you can run an email tracking blocker from e.g. Wizard Industries. However, you never know what these guys do to your email behind the curtains of their 2.99 USD piece of software ...
Read Rafe's column at http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/AnchorDesk/4520-7297_16-5138088.html.
Again, Google shows its strength: in the press center, you can find a page that shows popular queries, operating systems and browsers used to search, popular languages (Dutch is in 7th position), ... based on billions of queries from all over the world.
This interesting page can be found at the Google Press Center: Zeitgeist.
By the way, Google now has an official Google Blog at http://www.google.com/googleblog/.