software maker

No watered-down Internet. No sacrifices. That's the promise Hewlett-Packard Vice President and CTO Phil McKinney offered consumers in a blog post about the PC giant's upcoming tablet computer. HP's iPad competitor, he promised, will offer a full web browsing experience in the palm of your hand.

Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer intends to keep the regulatory heat on Google as his company strives to lessen its rival's dominance of Internet search.

In an appearance Tuesday at a search engine conference, Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet's lucrative search advertising market. He didn't specify the alleged misconduct.

"We are expressing some of the issues and frustrations we see" with antitrust regulators, Ballmer said. "Sometimes (it's) unsolicited, sometimes because we have been asked."

The new year began harshly for Adobe Systems. Shares of the maker of Photoshop, Flash, and other widely used software have dropped almost 8 percent in 2010, after big gains last year, amid speculation that Adobe's Flash Web-video software will be eclipsed by a competing technology backed by Apple and Google.

Google's accusation that its e-mail accounts were hacked from China landed like a bombshell because it cast light on a problem that few companies will discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cyberattacks.

The hacking that angered Google Inc. and hit dozens of other businesses adds to growing concern that China is a center for a global explosion of Internet crimes, part of a rash of attacks aimed at a wide array of targets, from a British military contractor to banks and chemical companies to a California software maker.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday its earnings in the most recent quarter jumped 60 percent, as a rebound in the personal computer industry drove sales of the company's latest Windows operating system.

But results in Microsoft's other divisions show that while consumers have resumed spending on new PCs, big corporations have not.

Oracle, the world's second-largest software maker, faces an "uphill battle" in persuading European Union antitrust regulators to approve its planned $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc., lawyers said.

The European Commission, the EU's competition authority, has threatened to block the deal because of concerns that Oracle might be able to eliminate Sun's MySQL database product as a competitor, according to an EU document. Oracle will counter the EU's case at a closed-door hearing this week in Brussels.

Apple will soon begin offering its iPhones through carriers in South Korea. On Wednesday, Apple jumped its last hurdle in getting the iPhone into the hands of mobile-phone users in South Korea.

Apple has won its lawsuit against Psystar, which has been selling Mac OS X in Mac clone computers. The decision in Apple's favor is expected to pave the way for Apple to argue its copyright-infringement case against future violators.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based software maker's claim against Psystar was granted, according to U.S. District Judge William Aslup's decision, and Psystar's anticompetitive claim against Apple was denied.

For years, hardly a week went by when someone didn't whip out their iPhone and evangelize the unconverted about how amazing it is. Nowadays, that's happening more often at the workplace, as executives switch from their old standbys -- typically the BlackBerry -- to Apple's alluring smartphone.

"It connects me directly to my business software," says Elliott Rabin of San Diego's Ridout Plastics, who is an almost daily user of NetSuite, a business suite produced by a San Francisco software maker of the same name.

What a difference a debacle makes. Three years ago, Microsoft's introduction of the supposedly new, improved version of its flagship operating system was plagued by problems of every stripe. Vista, then the latest version of Windows, was years late. It was released to corporations in time for the yearend selling season but not available to consumers until January.