August 17, 2001 -- The Nasdaq got slammed Friday after a U.S. federal appeals court rejected Microsoft's request to delay the government's antitrust proceedings against the software firm.

Most tech stocks immediately headed south, capping off a week that saw the technology-laden index dip from a close near 2,000 on Tuesday to approximately 1,875 by Friday afternoon.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Microsoft's request that the case against them be put on hold while the company appeals the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This means the case will likely be sent to a lower court next Friday, where a new judge will be assigned to the case. The judge will then decide what steps should be taken to ensure Microsoft's does not retain a monopoly on the home Operating System market.

Shares in Microsoft were trading $62.64 Friday afternoon, down two dollars.

The PSINet saga moved closer to completion Thursday when Canadian telecom TELUS said that its bid to purchase the struggling ISP's Canadian facilities and operations was accepted as the winning bid.

TELUS announced in June that it had signed an agreement with certain subsidiaries of PSINet Inc. to purchase its Canadian operations and facilities for approximately $77 million US, subject to a number of conditions. TELUS said PSINet will now seek court approval to complete the purchase by the end of September.

Shares in TELUS dropped about 2 percent Friday, and were trading at approximately $23 on the Toronto Stock Exchange as the weekend approached.

The Web hosting sector as a whole got a bit of a boost Thursday when research firm Jupiter Media Metrix released a study praising the merits of outsourcing. The report said hosting Web sites and technology infrastructures internally is causing more than one-third of U.S. businesses to miss out on a chance to save 30 to 40 percent on their costs,

"Companies that continue to host their own sites will gain little competitive advantage and spend more money on staffing and technology than those that outsource these functions," said Jupiter research director David Taylor. "Those that act and act now will be saving millions in the long run."

Taylor estimates the savings could add up to between $6 million to $12 million over a three-year period.

One company that decided to outsource in a big way Wednesday was CanDeal, a company created by a consortium of Canadian banks to streamline and automate bond and money market trading in Canada through real-time consolidated price feeds. The company said it had selected private firm Q9 Networks to provide them with a suite of managed hosting services in a contract that has an initial value of $1.7 million.

Netscape founder Mark Andreessen and Loudcloud, his new startup, garnered a bit of the spotlight Tuesday when they unveiled a new suite of enterprise-based services. Among the new features the outsourcing specialists introduced were the Loudcloud Application Management services and the Loudcloud Foundation services. Each new service contains "critical" components a business could use to architect, deploy, manage, and scale its Internet initiatives. These new modules are backed by Loudcloud's Opsware automation technology, which allow clients to control to manage a diverse set of hardware, networking technology and software systems.

Shares in Loudcloud were trading at $1.42 Friday afternoon, down five cents. And finally, Web hosting firm Exodus Communications and storage software firm Veritas said Monday they would team up to bring Veritas' suite of storage software solutions to Exodus customers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Shares in Exodus, which have had a tough time dealing with market turbulence the past few months, were trading at $1.46 Friday afternoon.

With the retail and manufacturing sectors professing as much doom and gloom as the tech industry recently (Gap and Ford announced poor earnings and job cuts respectively on Friday), the short-term outlook for markets across the board aren't very good. Don't expect any major recoveries for the Nasdaq next week unless we get some seriously positive news out of the world of technology.