As promised, Microsoft today released an out-of-band update to correct a bevy of flaws in its Windows GDI implementation.
At least one of these flaws, which collectively affect all supported versions of Windows -- including Windows Vista -- has already been linked to a known zero day attack exploit. Microsoft last week confirmed that an attacker who successfully exploits a flaw in its Windows Animated Cursor Handling implementation can take complete control of a compromised Windows system.
Microsoft has filed five new lawsuits against U.S. companies and individuals it claims sold deeply discounted Windows and Office software intended for students.
The company filed the suits Monday evening in federal courts in California, Nevada and Florida, alleging the parties infringed on Microsoft's copyright by importing and distributing versions of Windows and Office that were not meant to be sold through the retail channel.
"The defendants in these lawsuits and others are charged with profiting from selling clearly marked educational software to unsuspecting retail customers who were not licensed to use it," Bonnie MacNaughton, senior attorney at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Microsoft announced today that its Expression Web product will immediately be included as part of the Microsoft Developer Network Premium subscription. Later this year, subscribers will gain access to Expression Blend, a tool for creating rich user interfaces for Web and desktop applications, the company says.
The move follows an outcry from developers, who had slammed the company for initially charging subscribers a $99 upgrade fee for Expression Web, which shipped in December 2006. S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, acknowledged the public backlash in a post on his blog.
Microsoft's Office Open XML format moved a step closer to becoming an ISO standard on April 2, when it was opened up for five months of technical review and balloting, which ends Sept. 2.
This is the latest in a string of developments over the past four months, which started when the Office Open XML format was approved as an Ecma standard last December.
Ecma International then began the fast-track process for the adoption of the Office Open XML format as an International Standards Organization standard in January 2007, which was followed by a contradiction period, during which ISO members had 30 days to submit contradictions or objections to the format.
A small Seattle startup company has burnished its Microsoft pedigree with the addition of a key member of the Windows Vista design team as a co-owner.
Jenny Lam, formerly the Windows User Experience creative director, confirmed Monday that she had left the company to join former Microsoft managers Hillel Cooperman and Walter Smith in a new software venture called Jackson Fish Market.
Separately, a former group marketing manager for Windows Vista, Brian Marr, has left to become managing director at Seattle-based marketing agency Wexley School for Girls.
Channel 9 was a radical development for Microsoft, because it sought to provide developers with an unfiltered inside view. The rawness of the early videos contributed to that sense of being inside the company.
Lenn Pryor, then Microsoft's director of Platform Evangelism, was the mastermind behind Channel 9. In the year before he left Microsoft, Channel 9 certainly offered more view inside the company, but it's debatable how unfiltered. In past conversations with Pryor, he indicated the site worked largely independent of public relations influence. The Channel 9 Doctrine makes a similar position.
Microsoft is offering two new licensing options for Windows Vista enterprise customers that want to take advantage of emerging scenarios for large data centers.
The first gives enterprise users the ability to run the Windows Vista Enterprise client on a diskless computer, said Scott
Woodgate, director in the Microsoft Windows product group. The second option, called the Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop,
for the first time lets users run a client version of Windows on servers in a data center so the OS can run locally via virtual
machines.
Microsoft, legendary for its large piles of cash, isn't keeping nearly as much of it around these days.
Of course, everything is relative, and the company won't be scrounging for change under Bill Gates' couch cushions anytime soon. But the $29 billion on hand at last count was less than half the cash and short-term investments held by Microsoft about two years ago.
It's the first time in more than five years that its cash balance has been below $30 billion.
The company's products, led by Windows and Office, are still generating large amounts of cash -- about $1 billion a month. But Microsoft has taken a series of steps to reduce its cash balance. Specifically, by Microsoft's count, the company has paid out nearly $100 billion through dividends and repurchasing its own stock in the past five years.
Microsoft said it's still on track to ship its so-called hypervisor-based virtualization feature for Longhorn Server within 180 days of that OS's release. (Longhorn Server is currently due in late 2007.) The feature, which is technically called Windows Server virtualization, will let Longhorn Server machines offer "bare metal" virtual machine installations that bypass the host OS--as do products such as Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 (R2)--and offer better performance and reliability. Of course, Microsoft competitor and PC virtualization pioneer VMware has offered this kind of functionality for years. But with Microsoft essentially integrating virtualization into Longhorn Server, virtualization is expected to quickly become a mainstream solution for businesses of all sizes. And speaking of Longhorn Server, its long-awaited Beta 3 release should be available soon.
With Windows XP, antipiracy measures were a bit of an afterthought. But with Windows Vista, Microsoft had pirates in its sights from the get-go. Even the unique Vista retail packaging--a plastic box with one round corner--was designed, in part, to thwart counterfeiters. And the packaging is just the start; most of Microsoft's antipiracy work is built-into the software itself, meaning that just copying the code and getting a product key isn't enough.
One such exploit was dubbed "Frankenbuild" because it merged bits of the beta versions of Windows Vista with the final product in an effort to defeat the validation checks built into the software. But, thanks to technology built into Vista, Microsoft was able to update its defenses and start flagging such systems--even those that initially passed activation--as illegitimate.