What a month it's been. Microsoft has been found guilty of general unpleasantness in business, 'Dotcom' stocks have taken a major nosedive, and IT Reviews has been redesigned. I'll deal with these three in reverse order of importance.

You know something's in trouble when the tabloids catch wind of it, and that's what happened in the Internet stock market recently. Lastminute.com was the first to feel the effects and, helped by the Microsoft ruling, things went downhill from there. It's not so much that people are losing faith in the Internet as a means of doing business, more that the realisation is dawning that many of these companies may not make a profit for five or ten years, if ever, and are therefore hopelessly over-valued. Throwing large bags of money at something doesn't guarantee its success - consider Rover.

Why were these stocks so over-valued in the first place? Because the herd instinct among share dealers makes sheep look like independent thinkers. Brokers got wind that the Internet is the Next Big Thing, and they wanted in whatever the cost. Like a 1920s film, with British adventurers offering cheap plastic beads to 'natives' in exchange for large blocks of heavy yellow metal, techno-savvy people saw this coming, knocked a few ideas together, asked for venture capital cash, got it, floated, took the money and ran.

Or tried to. Despite what you read in the papers, it's not quite that easy. Venture capitalists usually require contractual guarantees of some sort (they may have more money than sense, but they're not daft), and it's rare that the founders of any company are allowed to simply sell their shares immediately after flotation. A lock-in clause of, say, 10 percent maximum sellable per year is the norm. So a few people have become rich, but nowhere near as rich as their peak 'paper value' when the shares were at their highest. Don't laugh too loud, though. Not until you check where your pension fund has been invested.

This being an editorial, it would be rude not to comment on the Microsoft affair, so let's be polite. Bill Gates, reacting to the ruling, stated that it contradicted what users knew, namely that Microsoft had made computers more user-friendly, faster and cheaper. There's some truth in what he says, although many of those developments are actually due to IBM - notably unlike Apple - allowing others to copy and improve on its hardware. That's what spawned a thousand imitators, ultimately cutting prices as volume and competition increased.

Microsoft is no innocent victim. Stories abound of anti-competitive practices, and even if only ten percent of them are true, you really wouldn't want your daughter to marry a Microsoft manager. The company has slowly worked its way towards a user-friendly operating system, but its bullish marketing practices are what has taken the Windows brand to the top in preference to other, more technically and ergonomically worthy offerings. As a recent press release announced, "As increasing numbers of customers choose to adopt Windows 2000 as part of their UNIX networks, Microsoft is committed to ensuring that the Windows platform works well with other key platforms and systems in the heterogeneous computing environments". That's an interesting spin on the Linux story.

Finally, we've spent the last week redesigning IT Reviews. It now has even fewer graphics, but sports a slightly more cheerful colour scheme and should be faster and easier to navigate, without compromising its accessibility in older browsers. Fingers crossed, everything seems to be working well, but please let us know if you spot any errors or have problems accessing any part of the site.