Online sales will make up 15 per cent of all UK retail sales by the end of 2007, worth up to £40bn, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

The research, conducted on behalf of price comparison web site uSwitch, also predicts that internet sales will make up 40 per cent of all purchases by 2020.

This is a rise from just two per cent of total retail spend in 2002 and has been driven by online sales of products such as music, films and holidays.

The CEBR says the increasing speed of broadband and lower prices is turning web-based buying into a way of life for UK consumers.

‘The dramatic surge in online shopping last Christmas shows that UK consumers are already savvy to the benefits of buying online,’ said uSwitch head of communications Steve Weller.

‘Broadband prices have fallen up to 17 per cent while speeds have gone up, making it cheaper and simpler for consumers to log on instead of going out to the shops.’

Weller says online security has also improved, boosting confidence in internet shopping.

Retailers are increasingly discovering the need to invest in e-commerce infrastructure, he adds, with retailers seeing in-store profits fall at Christmas as online sales soared.

The research showed that other popular products purchased online include groceries, books, sporting goods, event tickets and insurance.

The real blue screen of death

Everyone knows the differences between Windows and other operating systems. Steve Jobs has recently spent colossal sums telling us that most malware is written for Windows; also that using Windows is no fun and, even worse, seems to involve wearing a tie.

Those acquainted with the more foam-lipped Linux fanciers will also be familiar with the position that Windows use is morally corrupt, indicative of sexual perversion, and causes cancer.

A lot of customers keep buying from Microsoft, however. One may want to deploy a particular kind of hardware, perhaps used only by a few organisations. It may well be that you can only get the associated software from the hardware maker, and the vendor in question doesn't provide anything other than Windows-based machines.

One type of hardware where this is happening more and more is warships.

This shift has already been heavily criticised. Nonetheless, BAE Systems subsidiary Insyte, the UK's sole provider of warship command systems, has decided to standardise on Win2k (this was during the company's former incarnation as AMS).

The Type 45 destroyers now being launched will run Windows for Warships: and that's not all. The attack submarine Torbay has been retrofitted with Microsoft-based command systems, and as time goes by the rest of the British submarine fleet will get the same treatment, including the Vanguard class (V class). The V boats carry the UK's nuclear weapons and are armed with Trident ICBMs, tipped with multiple H-bomb warheads.

All this raises a number of worrying issues. First up is basic reliability and usability. Most of us have stared in helpless despair at the dreaded blue screen; how much worse would you feel if that wasn't just your desktop gone but your combat display, and it really was the screen of death?

Surely we can't have our jolly tars let down by possibly untrustworthy, difficult to use kit such as Windows? Especially when you reflect that cost is not an issue. When you're buying destroyers at £1bn per hull, the price difference between 26 PCs and the same number of Sun workstations barely shows up.

Big step forward

All that may be so. However, the sad fact is that Windows will probably be a big step forward for the Royal Navy (RN). Anyone who has spent time in an RN warship is entirely accustomed to seeing equipment on which he may depend for his life occasionally throw a double six for no good reason. Windows may be unreliable, but it's hard to imagine it being as failure-prone as the kit which is out there already.

Again, Windows platforms may be troublesome to maintain, but most civilian sysadmins simply wouldn't believe the resources the navy can throw at problems. A present-day Type 42 destroyer carries at least four people who have absolutely nothing else to do but care for the ship's command system. As of just a few years ago, this was still a pair of antique 24-bit, 1MHz machines each with about 25KB of RAM.

Two of the seagoing sysadmins will be senior technicians with at least five years' expensive general training and months of courses specifically tailored for the kit they are minding now. Their assistants will be less skilled, but still useful. They can take care of drudgery – minor bumf, safety checks, making tea – freeing the real techs for serious work. And the on-board team would seldom be expected to cope with anything as complex as a software update. That would be done in harbour by more advanced specialists, probably including vendor reps. Nor do the combat sysadmins get lumbered with general IT desktop support; there are other people to do that, also lavishly trained. If any organisation can keep Windows functional, it's Her Majesty's navy.

By Lewis Page

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Google has launched a business version of its Google Apps hosted productivity software service.

Charged at £26 per user per year, Google Apps Premier Edition is designed to provide businesses with a low cost way to roll out e-mail and desktop software to a large number of end-users.

The applications – which include Google’s Gmail web-based e-mail, its Docs & Spreadsheets office productivity tools, instant messaging, calendar and IP telephony – are hosted on Google’s servers and accessed over the internet.

While some of these applications have previously been free to home users, the Premier Edition includes 10Gbytes of storage per user, application programming interfaces for business integration, a promise of 99.9 % uptime and round-the-clock support for critical issues.

Advertising is also switched off by default and IT directors are able to customise the look and feel of the Google Apps page with their own logos.

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Microsoft order to pay $1.5bn MP3 damages to Alcatel-Lucent

Microsoft has been ordered by a US court to pay $1.52bn (£800m) in damages to Alcatel-Lucent for violating two MP3 patents.

The patents in question cover the conversion of audio into the digital MP3 file format on PCs.

In 2003, Lucent, which was acquired by Alcatel last year, filed 15 patent claims against Gateway and Dell for technology developed by its research arm Bell Labs.

In the same year, Microsoft added itself to the list of defendants, claiming the patents were closely linked to its Windows operating system. The PC makers are still fighting the case.

A district court in San Diego has now awarded the damages against Microsoft to Alcatel-Lucent, but Microsoft said it intends to appeal.

Microsoft disputes that Alcatel-Lucent's patents govern its MP3 encoding and decoding tools. It says the software used by its Windows Media Player is licensed from German firm Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, said, “We think this verdict is completely unsupported by the law or the facts. We will seek relief from the trial court, and if necessary appeal.

"Like hundreds of other companies large and small, we believe that we properly licensed MP3 technology from its industry recognised licensor – Fraunhofer. The damages award seems particularly outrageous when you consider we paid Fraunhofer only $16m to license this technology.”

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BT to open £17m datacentre to host high-end enterprise services

BT Global Services is building a new £17m data services centre within the M25 perimeter to serve the enterprise market.

The South London facility will host high end IT services such as business continuity, IT transformation, and IT infrastructure hosting and management for large enterprises and public sector customers.

BT said the new datacentre will use biometric security measures to conform to the high infrastructure security standards required by the likes of financial services firms and government.

Andy Green, CEO of BT Global Services, said, “Datacentre services are fundamental to the delivery of networked IT services. This significant investment demonstrates our long-term commitment to supplying networked IT services globally.

“Our ambition is to achieve growth of 20% per annum in the datacentre services market.”

The new datacentre is scheduled to be in service by this September, said BT.

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