Web Applications

Google delivered the latest salvo in its battle to wrest control from Microsoft over office productivity with its purchase of DocVerse, a Microsoft Office collaboration startup. The Wall Street Journal reported the purchase price was $25 million.

DocVerse was founded in 2007 by former Microsoft executives Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. The first product is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows users of the desktop software to collaborate on Office documents.

Microsoft on Monday announced what it called a "significant milestone" with the release of Windows Azure and SQL Azure in 21 countries. That means customers and partners can launch their Windows Azure and SQL Azure production applications and services with a full service-level agreement.

Heartland Payment Systems. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Aetna. These are just a few of the organizations that were victims of major data breaches in 2009. While groups like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse compile the final numbers to quantify the financial and personal impact for a year of blockbuster data breaches, security researchers and software vendors are looking back at what we can learn from 2009.

Google's computer operating system, due to be released next year, may rank among software most targeted by hackers in 2010, according to a Dec. 29 report from the computer security company McAfee.

The Web-based operating system, dubbed Chrome, relies on a technology known as HTML 5 that's designed to help Web applications behave like PC software. Developers use HTML 5 language to ensure that software delivers fast response times and stores information that users can access even when they're not connected to the Internet.

Firefox is five years old. Five years ago, Microsoft seemed to have an absolute lock on the browser market with Internet Explorer, having long ago crushed Netscape. The browser wars were over. Or so it seemed.

According to Net Applications' Market Share, 64.6 percent of Web users run Internet Explorer, compared to 24 percent running Mozilla's Firefox. Other browsers like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera have another 10 percent of the market. Two years ago, IE controlled almost 80 percent of the browser market and Firefox had only 15 percent.

Adobe Systems announced Monday new services that will allow advertisers and content publishers to "promote, measure and monetize" Flash-based applications over "social networks, desktops and mobile devices."

VMware has all but closed the deal to acquire SpringSource in a $420 million cash and stock transaction. The idea is to offer new solutions that help companies build, run and manage applications within internal and external cloud architectures more efficiently.

In a move to combat the growing use of Google Apps, Microsoft told developers on Monday it will make the key applications in its Office 2010 suite available free online. The announcement came at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

Anyone with a free Windows Live account will be able to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online. That will allow users to easily create, edit and share documents with others.

Opera on Tuesday unveiled a technology that aims to disrupt the client-server computing model of the Web. Dubbed Opera Unite, the technology turns any computer into both a client and a server so it can interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web. Unite eliminates the need for third-party servers.

Opera CEO John von Tetzchner said Opera is opening up the full potential of the Web to everyone. PCs decentralized computing from large mainframes, he said, and Opera Unite is taking the next step by decentralizing the cloud.

Most eyes may be on the iPhone 3GS this week (and a few on the new MacBook Pro family), but one of Apple's latest product launches is making plenty of noise beyond the hardware spotlight. More than 11 million copies of Safari 4, the latest version of Apple's Web browser, have been downloaded in the first three days of its release. That figure includes more than six million downloads of Safari for Windows.