This week was a very exciting one with a number of companies in the tech sector reporting their earnings results for the latest quarter. There were also a couple of major announcements from some prominent tech major like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL).

Microsoft

Microsoft is one of those companies which always finds itself in the news. This past week, Microsoft announced that it had signed a patent licensing deal with yet another Android device manufacturer – Compal. Microsoft now has licensing deals with a majority of Android manufacturers, and is on track to generate more than a billion dollars in licensing revenues in the coming year from Android alone.

Nokia and Microsoft also unveiled the first Windows Phone devices by Nokia at the Nokia World conference this week. Nokia has tied its fate to the future of the Windows Phone platform, and Microsoft and Nokia will try their best to capture a significant portion of the smartphone market in the coming years.^[1]

Microsoft also announced that it will be giving away 25,000 free Nokia Windows Phone devices to developers in order to attract them to the platform. Microsoft also announced that it is working with component manufacturers to get the cost of building Windows Phones down to $200, aiming at the budget smartphone segment.

HP also announced that it will be working on Windows 8 tablets, which has strengthened Microsoft’s chance of capturing significant market share in the tablet market. Tablet sales overtook netbook shipments in the last quarter, which makes Windows 8 a very crucial release for Microsoft.^[2]

Check out our complete analysis for Microsoft

Oracle

Oracle has been in expansion mode this last month. It announced a host of new offerings at the Open World conference earlier in October, and finally launched its integrated cloud offering – Oracle Public Cloud.

It has also been on an acquisition spree lately, buying GoAhead software, a service availability software maker, and Endeca, a big data analysis product company to boost its own offerings.

It made another significant acquisition this week – RightNow, a leading provider of cloud based customer service. This acquisition pits Oracle directly against Salesforce.com in the cloud based CRM segment. We expect Oracle to continue to grow its marketshare either organically or via acquisitions in the enterprise software market.

Check out our complete analysis for Oracle

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