Microsoft Archive

Redmond's Tim McDonough says Mac lovers have no need to fret over the giant's purchase of the cross-platform franchise from Connectix. Read the interview at BusinessWeek.

In a report inspired by the advice of a departing Microsoft manager, a Merrill Lynch technology analyst wrote that the software company must "notch up the innovation component" if it wants to succeed in an era of networked systems and increased pervasiveness of open-source applications. The report, released Wednesday by Merrill tech strategist Steven Milunovich, analyzes points raised in an essay recently published by retiring Microsoft program manager David Stutz.

Microsoft on Tuesday will offer a glimpse at future versions of its Visual Studio.Net development tools and highlight a number of additions to the product line. In the meantime, support grows for .Net: A number of Microsoft partners will announce at VSLive products targeted at Microsoft's .Net. Also, Microsoft Corp. on Monday renamed its XDocs application to InfoPath, but declined to say whether this information-gathering tool would ship as part of Office 11, the code name for the next version of Office, or if it would be sold as a stand-alone product.

"Microsoft nearly doubled its losses from the Xbox video game console in the December quarter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meanwhile, the unit that makes Microsoft's Office software closed in on Windows as being the company's most profitable." Read more at News.com.

2002 was a good year for Microsoft --­ certainly more so than 2001. And the optimism continues, with a distinctly Microsoft-friendly administration in power in the US that has as good as declared itself uninterested in pursuing the company through the courts for any corporate misdeeds it may or may not have committed in the past.

In a Microsoft mailing list posting sent yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reports that the company is making progress on its initiative to make its products more secure, though he also notes that the demand for security has risen since Microsoft began the initiative. New versions of Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, and Exchange Server will have all passed the new, more stringent, testing, and users will notice that vulnerable services will be turned off by default. Gates also promoted the use of smart cards for authentication in the email. Read more in this PC World article.

Microsoft Corp. has stated that the company will open its source code to governments and international organizations worldwide. This move follows various government requests and government announcements of adopting open source strategies, mainly for security and integration reasons. Update: The Register also posted an interesting article regarding this announcement.

Microsoft, which is trying to move its software from desktops to people's hands and pockets, on Wednesday unveiled plans for a portable media player and a radio-linked wristwatch. The announcements by Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates come as the world's largest software company mounts a push beyond its existing market stronghold in computer operating systems toward a range of devices such as Tablet PCs, cars, monitors and even exercise bikes.

According to this table on the Microsoft website MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and NT 3.5x reached their end of life on December 31, 2002 and will no longer be supported by Microsoft.

"Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other. " You can get the full article over at Sudhian Media.

"...if the nine states and the District of Columbia decided against an appeal, Microsoft would cover the states' expenses and provide an additional pot of funds for the states to help enforce the settlement deal, the sources said." Read the full article at the Washington Post.

Rational Software Corp is joining Big Blue's stable of industry leaders-turned-business units after IBM announced its $2.1bn acquisition of the application modeling and design specialist. The news is a blow to Microsoft Corp, which on Friday conceded executives had "talked internally" about an acquisition of Rational. Rational's XDE software modeling tool, launched in February, sat inside Microsoft' Visual Studio.NET integrated development environment (IDE) in addition to IBM's WebSphere. Read the article at ComputerWire.

"For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world. But now, with the advent of huge Intel machines and the approaching release of a new version of Windows that will run on them, the company is changing its tune. For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company's sales transaction database, Microsoft's preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a "cluster". It's been a tough sell, however, with large corporations sticking with mainframes or Unix servers." Read the report at News.com.

Under the leadership of CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft is free to turn its attention to such initiatives as acquisitions, .Net, shared source code and a more componentized Windows. Ballmer addressed these issues and others, including why Office 11 requires Windows XP, in an interview at Microsoft headquarters, in Redmond, Wash., with eWeek. Read the interview at eWeek.