Microsoft Archive

The EU antitrust case against Microsoft is a battle over the future technical standards for Hollywood films, online music and other forms of digital entertainment, analysts say.

After years of railing against open source, Microsoft Corp is preparing to shift its stance by releasing code to the open source community. A member of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative has told ComputerWire open source code is "coming". Stephen Walli, platform's business development manager, added Microsoft would likely release "non core" code.

Testimony during the second week of trial in the consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota has revealed (free reg. req.) some embarrassing internal documents from Microsoft which were not disclosed in the bitter 1997 federal antitrust lawsuit that focused on the company's attempt to control the browser markets in the 1990's.

Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as "Whidbey," scheduled for release in the first half of 2005.

From the PR: :"Microsoft Corp. today took another step forward in its strategy to make the business value of speech technology more broadly available to mainstream enterprise companies as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates launched Microsoft Speech Server 2004 at the co-located AVIOS~SpeechTEK Spring 2004, Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference (DevCon) 2004 and Fawcette Technical Publications' VSLive! San Francisco 2004 events." Elsewhere, Microsoft has announced XNATM, a powerful next-generation software development platform. XNA empowers developers to deliver breakthrough games while combating rising production costs and ever-increasing hardware complexity.

Most people don’t know about Microsoft's other multitasking operating system, MS-DOS 4.0 which was actually a version of MS-DOS 2.0 that was written in parallel with MS-DOS 3.x (DOS 3.x shipped while DOS 4 was under development, which is why it skipped a version). The MS-DOS 4 version described here was never shipped and instead a beefed-up version of 3.x was labeled 4.0 and shipped instead.

While the European Commission this week goes through the final steps to conclude its five-year case against Microsoft, the company's legal problems in Europe are far from over and appear to be accelerating, antitrust lawyers and officials said.

Microsoft software designed for, of all things, cash registers and slot machines played a persuasive role in the European Union's landmark antitrust case labeling it an abusive monopolist.

Microsoft recognises the benefits of open source but is not prepared to turn over its Windows operating system to the paradigm. Instead, Microsoft provides access to source code on a limited basis, said a Microsoft representative.

Microsoft Corp. executives on Tuesday spent a lot of time talking up the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is the company's vision and technology roadmap for reducing the cost of managing and securing enterprise systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft exec says that open source model endangers the software economy.

The wait for the long-awaited Yukon and Whidbey is going to be longer still, eWEEK.com has learned. Microsoft Corp. Director of Product Management for SQL Server Tom Rizzo confirmed that Microsoft expects to ship both Yukon—Microsoft's code name for the next major update of its SQL Server database—and Whidbey—the coming update of Visual Studio—in the first half of 2005.

If Microsoft cannot settle an antitrust case brought by European Union regulators, the company may be ordered to remove Windows Media Player as an integrated feature of the dominant Windows operating system, at least for personal computers sold in Europe.

European antitrust regulators are considering a requirement that Microsoft sell two versions of Windows in Europe--one with the music- and video-playing software stripped out--should they find the company to be an abusive monopoly, according to people close to the case.

Microsoft this year will seek to distance itself from Java rivals with tools designed to streamline how Windows-based business software is built and used.