Microsoft Archive

IBM's on-demand model is "crazy" and Open Source is "really a developer phenomenon" that does not stand comparison with "customer experience of Windows Live", said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, last week. In an interview, Fitzgerald said that there was no comparison between Microsoft Live, which offers on-demand features, and IBM's on-demand strategy. Elsewhere, references to free software and Linux were removed from a UN document after Microsoft claimed that such software aims to 'make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product'.

With the new Xbox console out, Redmond's next target is games for mobile phones, with plans to overhaul the business as we know it.

BentUser reviews what is famous for being Microsoft's worst product of all time - and finds out just exactly what is so terrible about it.

Microsoft's SQL Server development team learned a hard lesson from its work on SQL Server 2005: customers do not want to wait five years for an upgrade. From now on, a new development regime called the Software Reengineering Initiative will ensure that releases ship every two years whether new features are ready or not, said Mark Souza, who heads the SRI team.

Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 has begun shipping to manufacturers and is due for general release in the first week of December with a new pricing model and a number of new features, most notably formal support for Linux. "Technically, Linux already worked on Virtual Server, but with R2 we have formalised support, and we will continue to support Linux in the future," said Bob Muglia, who recently took over as senior vice-president of Microsoft's server and tools division.

"If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a 'Get the Facts' campaign? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a 'Get the Facts' advertisement nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me. Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me wonder."

"What will the Internet look like 10 years from now? Will it look more like one big pay-per-view channel, or more like an open street fair, or will it be somewhere in between? The answer will be heavily influenced, of course, by the competition between the King of Search and the current desktop market leader. On November 2, 2005, Microsoft announced its most major new initiative in 10 years, and although the announcement was vague, it is clear that Microsoft intends to directly take on Google on Google's own terms: search, services and advertising."

"Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than people talking about you is people NOT talking about you, and it must have been with this in mind that Microsoft recently "leaked" two company-wide memos concerning the Redmond's new strategic direction -- its so-called Live strategy that I wrote about last week" says Cringely.

In an e-mail to top executives, Gates urged company leaders to "act quickly and decisively" to move further into the field of offering such services, in order to best formidable competitors. But he also warned that the company must be thoughtful in building the right technology to serve the right audience. "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Gates wrote. "We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us - still, the opportunity to lead is very clear."

Microsoft launched on Sunday its corporate database aimed at taking market share from Oracle. Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, delayed several times as engineers sought to make the software more reliable and secure, is a corporate database program designed to store and retrieve business data. Along with SQL Server, Microsoft also launched Visual Studio 2005, a software tools program used to create applications.

Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability? Singularity is working to answer this question by building on advances in programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system (named Singularity), with the aim of producing a more robust and dependable software platform.

Microsoft on Thursday reported first quarter earnings just ahead of Wall Street estimates, though the company's sales and current quarter forecast fell short of expectations.

"As the Internet has grown in popularity so too have threats against computer users; making it critical for individuals and companies to employ effective security strategies to protect their critical information. Microsoft created the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) to investigate, fix and learn about security vulnerabilities and to help keep customers protected from malicious attacks." So, did it fair well?

"Someone has started rearranging content on the Internet to suit their own purposes and the culprit might be a convicted monopolist. This article examines some compelling evidence and asks Congress to investigate."