Most people agree that Apple’s iPod has a lock on the personal digital music player business. It is a great product and one of the most disruptive technologies in a generation. In the consumer electronics space, the last such disruptive technology was Sony’s Walkman.So, when the iPod has captured the imagination and the market, would you expect another company to go headbanging with Apple to get some of the pie? You bet. It seems Microsoft wants to try this task with its Zune, a portable music device.

"This is not a six-month initiative, where somehow in six months we will have captured the marketplace," Microsoft entertainment and devices division president Robbie Bach was quoted as saying last week by InformationWeek. "This will be a four, five, six-year investment horizon."

The Zune brand is stated to be a line of hardware and software for mobile entertainment, both music and video. Microsoft isn’t aiming to simply recreate the iPod experience, Bach said. "We’re not just doing Zune to copy what others have," Bach said. "We think there are real advantages to what Microsoft has to offer here."

According to IW, YouTube may be as much of an inspiration to Microsoft as the iPod. Mr Bach cited video search as an area where Microsoft hopes to differentiate itself, by enabling users to seek out and recommend to each other multimedia content. Social networking will be another focus for Microsoft, Bach said, pointing to Microsoft’s experience in building the Xbox community.

Apparently, Microsoft hasn’t been sitting on its hands in the coming battle with Apple. It has shifted key developers from the Xbox team to the Zune project. Microsoft’s dependence on their expertise forced it to hold off on initiating Zune until after it shipped Xbox 360, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying. "I wish we’d had the capacity to do Zune a year earlier," he said.

Mr Ballmer also acknowledged that Apple’s iPod is a daunting rival. "There’s no other company, for better or for worse, that would be trying to get into that business at this time," he said. "Nobody else has the optimism, nobody else has the financial resources."

Microsoft says said Zune will be a partner-friendly play; other companies will be invited to build around the Zune brand and platform. "We’re going to encourage people to continue working with PlaysForSure and the interfaces that interact with Media Player and all the technologies that are in the core platform of Windows," Bach said. "We’re going to keep working with our partners on those fronts and hope that, between what we do on PlaysForSure and what we do with Zune, we can scale the Windows ecosystem."

Union finance minister P. Chidambaram on Sunday urged various sectors of business and industry to replicate the success achieved in the information technology industry.Inaugurating the silver jubilee celebrations of Infosys at its sprawling campus in Mysore, the finance minister said, "In five years, the software industry will employ more people than any other industry in any country in the world and in 10 years will be the largest employers in this country. The same can be done in steel, petroleum, mining, agriculture, food products and aerospace."

Mr Chidambaram said that, "25 years after the voyage begun by seven young men (Mr Narayana Murthy and his team) with Rs 10,000, we are here celebrating the success of a great enterprise that makes all Indians proud and places India among the frontline nations in software and technology. I want you to believe that people of India know better than their government and want you to have a healthy respect for the law and a healthy suspicion of anyone who wields authority. What is best for India can be decided by people and not by charlatans and impostors, ministers and politicians." India, he said, "is not a poor

country but a country with poor people. Give any Indian education, medical care, opportunity, a job, or opportunity to create a business and that Indian along with fellow citizens will build for himself a future truly satisfying, which no state or government can provide."Talking about the days of controls and shackles that the economy was subjected to, Mr Chidambaram said there are still a few controls. The state had a role to play, that of an enabler.

In a reference to the campus and the curriculum, Mr Chidambaram said, "We see here a revolution in the making of students who have opportunities in engineering both mechanical and chemical and in 16 weeks they will be taught skills equal to anywhere in the world. If this can be done in 16 weeks, imagine what can be done if we put our minds to achieve it," he said.

Talking of the immense power that resides in young India, he said, "This is the only country in the world where the working age population will continue to grow in 25 years. Not even China has it. If each one in 25 years gets education, can be trained, imparted skills, imagine the immense wealth that can be created. We missed the industrial revolution as we were a colony at the time. We started late but have caught up with the best in the software industry. Nandan Nilekani tells me that there is a saying that ‘IBM is a legacy but Infosys is the future’."

Mr Narayana Murthy announced that the trustees of Infosys Employees Welfare Trust, an independent body, has decided to distribute a part of the corpus of the Trust, amounting to Rs 126 crores to all of its beneficiaries to commemorate the silver jubilee celebrations of the company.

The board of the Steel Authority of India (Sail) gave its in-principle approval to six projects, involving a total expenditure of over Rs 11,000 crores on Friday. Leading the list is a proposal for expansion of IISCO Steel Plant (ISP) at Rs 9,592 crores, incorporating latest technologies.

Projects worth nearly Rs 6,000 crores are currently being executed in the Sail plants and mines. The company has laid a thrust on capital expenditure in order to achieve its new target of producing 22.5 million tonnes of hot metal in about 4 years.

Sail chairman V.S. Jain, who presented the company’s first quarter results at a press conference, said that they would fund their Rs 11,000-crore expansion plan through internal accruals. He said, "Our internal accruals will suffice to take care of our capital expenditure." Mr Jain said that the company is seriously considering two or three proposals to acquire coal mines oversees. It is is looking at proposals from Canada, Australia and Russia for the acquisitions, he said.

The unaudited financial results for April-June 2006 showed a profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 1,386 crores, a 23 per cent increase over the same period last year. This is the highest PAT achieved by Sail in any Q1, Mr Jain said. At Rs 8,412 crores, the sales turnover of the company was also 29 per cent higher than that of the first three months of 2005-06.

The improved financial performance was achieved despite a 27 per cent increase in price of imported coking coal in Q1 of the current financial year over the corresponding period last year. Prices of other metallic inputs like zinc and aluminium, too, were very high. Strong market pull, however, led to record saleable steel production of 3.1 million tonnes (9 per cent growth) and sales of 2.45 million tonnes (30 per cent growth)

Continuing with its status as a virtual debt-free company, Sail said it reduced its borrowings from Rs 4,298 crores as on March 31, 2006 to Rs 4,000 crores on June 30, 2006. The company’s interest outgo during Q1 this year, too, was substantially lower at Rs 94 crores. Mr Jain said, "We have the potential to raise Rs 13,000-14,000 crores in debt."