In what could be a broader victory for American software companies, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Microsoft cannot be forced to pay up for patent infringement that occurs when copies of Windows are made and installed on computers abroad.
Generally, U.S. patent protection does not transcend American borders. At issue in this case is a complex exception in patent law that bars American companies from shipping "components" to foreign manufacturers, which could then combine them to make a machine that infringes on U.S. patents. The law does not, however, restrict sending blueprints that could theoretically prompt a foreign company to build an identical product.
With Microsoft's MIX 07 conference for Web developers and designers coming up the week of April 30, some companies are lining up to demonstrate their support for the Microsoft developer and designer platforms, including Lab49 and Infragistics.
Lab49, a consulting firm that specializes in building applications for global financial institutions, this week announced that it has formed a practice dedicated to developing WPF applications for the financial services industry.
As an early adopter of WPF, the consultancy, which has offices in both New York and London, has been prototyping and applying WPF to financial applications since its introduction. The company claims to be the first consultancy to create a dedicated WPF practice within the financial services industry.
Microsoft will ship its long-awaited Forefront Client Security product--a managed security solution for enterprises--in "the next month or so," according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Forefront has been in development for four years and in active beta testing for the past year. "We do live in a world in which the bad guys, so to speak, are also getting smarter all the time, and it is important to be able to lock the core infrastructure, and then protect around it in a way that is a bit more dynamic," Ballmer said during a keynote address at the Microsoft Security & Management Seminar in Amsterdam. "So we are, with our Forefront line of products, entering the security business."
Coming on the heels of Apple's quarterly results, during which the computer and consumer electronics firm announced that it had sold 10.5 million iPod digital media players, the following information is going to seen as somewhat lackluster by comparison: Microsoft announced late Wednesday that its Zune digital media player is "holding steady" and continues to be the number two selling hard drive-based portable media player.
According to NPD data cited by Microsoft, the Zune controlled 9.1 percent of the hard drive-based portable media player market in March, second only to Apple's iPod, which presumably controlled most of the other 90 percent.
Microsoft is expected to show a new friendliness to the open-source community by unveiling plans to release the source code
to a part of its Silverlight technology at MIX 07 next week, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.
Sources said Microsoft will also release a beta of Silverlight, a recently unveiled browser plug-in that allows Web content
providers to offer a rich video and interactive media experience from directly within Web sites. The technology leverages
Vista's new graphics framework, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Microsoft is promoting it as a direct competitor to Adobe's
Flash tool and delivery mechanism for rich multimedia content on the Web.
A protester calling for free computer software and open source programming crashed a speech Friday by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at one of China's top universities.
Gates, who is very popular on Chinese campuses, had just finished a speech at Beijing University and was handing out prizes to students when a man walked on stage and unveiled a banner with "free software, open source" written on it.
Gates and most of the group appeared shocked at the intrusion, which ended when the man ran off the stage and was tackled by security officials.
Microsoft exceeded Wall Street's quarterly financial expectations Thursday and, perhaps as important, delivered no unwelcome surprises as it gave the first glimpse of what's to come in its next fiscal year.
It was Microsoft's first financial report since the January retail launch of Windows Vista, the new version of its flagship product. Investors were apparently encouraged by the outcome, sending the share price up in after-hours trading.
"You see a little relief here," said Alan Davis, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co., recalling a forecast a year ago when Microsoft stunned investors with plans to spend around $2 billion more than many analysts expected.
Microsoft plans to make some of the security improvements and features it built into Office 2007 available for Office 2003, a company representative said Thursday.
Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will be focused on security, said Joshua Edwards, a technical product manager for Office at Microsoft. "We're trying to take what we learned from building Office 2007 and bring as much as we can to Office 2003," Edwards said in an interview with CNET News.com.
Microsoft hasn't yet set a release date for the Office 2003 update, which like other service packs will be available as a free upgrade. Also, there are no details of what will be in the update, other than that Microsoft is "backporting" work it did for Office 2007.
Microsoft will release the feature-complete, third beta for Windows Server "Longhorn" on April 25, which is also the first public beta of the software.
The product remains on track for release to manufacturing in the second half of 2007, and the beta code can be downloaded here.
Some 10,000 people in Microsoft's technical beta program have already tested the product, while thousands more downloaded or received the second beta and the Community Technology Preview that followed through their TechNet and MSDN subscriptions, Helene Love Snell, the senior product manager for Windows Server, told eWEEK.
Plunk your digital camera down on a specially-equipped table and all of the images stored within the camera are projected onto the
surface in a nice fan fold, as if someone took the time to lay them out.
Or how about getting help from a remote colleague who projects a virtual image of her hands to point out corrections in a document? Forget what you did last week? Look it up on your LifeBrowser, which tracks and records where you went on the Web, what you worked on and who you met with.