Stories by: Eric Lai

Danube Technologies is a small maker of software tools for Scrum and agile programmers. While Danube's technology and audience is cutting-edge, its licensing model is old school.

It's official: IT budgets, once so resilient in the face of three years of worsening economic news, aren't immune to the downturn after all.

Silicon Valley is the epitome of California's youth worship, geek-style. It's the stage where wunderkinds emerge and are feted: Yahoo's Jerry Yang and David Filo, Netscape's Marc Andreessen, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -- all in their 20s when they hit it big. Going farther back, let's not forget Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were 21 and 25, respectively, when they started Apple Computer.

Oracle's powerful new HP Oracle Database Machine comes with 168TB of storage, a new method of retrieving data more quickly and intelligently, and -- wait for it -- a US$2.33 million price tag.

Data cleansing is a dirty, thankless job. But Donnie Steward, CIO for ACH Food Companies, knew he had to do it in order to bring the Memphis firm's IT systems from the 1980s into 2008.

As the dynamic duo steering Microsoft together for the past 28 years, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been a near-unstoppable team, combining Gates's technical vision and will to power with Ballmer's salesmanship and rousing, if polarizing, personality.

Changes were made to OOXML between Ecma's approval a year and a half ago and ISO's approval this spring. Microsoft won't support the ISO version until Office 14 arrives around the end of 2009. Is this a big deal, as Microsoft critics such as Andy Updegrove claim?

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

In addition to the question of what corporate policy now-former Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott violated to lead to his termination by the company on Monday, many other unknowns remain.

Why would a successful CIO leave one company to become co-CIO of another with only one-third the revenue and employees? Answer: The new company is Microsoft. Stuart Scott moved there in mid-2005 from General Electric, the US$160 billion, 319,000-employee behemoth where he had worked for 17 years, most recently as CIO of GE Industrial Systems. Then, about a year ago, co-CIO Ron Markezich was tapped to run Microsoft's budding managed services business. Scott has been Microsoft's sole CIO since then.

Over the past decade, China and India have become leaders in high-tech manufacturing and IT services, respectively. But could either country - or an allied "Chindia" - overtake the US as the global high-tech leader within the next 10 years?