Editorial: IBM’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems:hiding a murder in a war
Opinion: IE8 accelerator add-ons: not yet leading the social network integration race

The end of first quarter came quickly this year with little fanfare, and the promise of more economic gloom. However Q2 2009 could actually provide a positive economic reprieve in an otherwise sparse year. Happily,Longhaus were spot on with our prediction for where Australia’s ICT economy would finish at the end of March and so it is with some confidence that we expect to see a rise in the Australian Tech Index in the coming quarter. The wide-spread under-spends of Q1 will certainly contribute and translate into additional activity in the run up to the end of the financial year.

This month’s editorial explores some of the decision mechanisms behind the potential IBM-Sun acquisition while our other article explores Microsoft’s attempts at social software integration in the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). And finally in other news, Longhaus successfully re-launched www.longhaus.com a few weeks ago and thank you to everyone who sent us your comments. The new format has indeed exposed much more of the underlying content and we have seen a dramatic increase in traffic as a result. Rest assured there is more content and service announcements to come, the first of which will appear next month.

We’ll see you in the market or next month in Longview, or just follow us on Twitter for regular sound bites throughout the month (@thenakedchief and @shigginski). Read more...