D. IBM tried to counter the growth of Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm, by launching a $3.3 billion hostile bid for Lotus Development, a software company. The $ 60-a –share offer boosted the price of Lotus shares by 89%. IBM sees Lotus’s Notes software as a passport into the growing market for ‘groupware’ programs that help networks of computers talk to each other.
E. The European Commission published a consultative paper on its promise single currency, in which it suggested that there would have to be four years between a final decision to launch the new currency and its arrival in citizens’ pockets. It predicted that speculators would use the interval to make destabilising bets on the final conversion rates of the old currencies. But the commission is sticking to its deadline of January 1999 for economic and monetary union.
