Microsoft's delays in making software code available to licensees prompted a federal judge to express her concern and decide to revisit in June whether the company is complying with an antitrust settlement.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Tuesday that she will wait to see in three months whether the company meets goals agreed to with the government on providing the documentation needed by rivals to make software that works well with Microsoft's. The judge also asked for details of a new, anonymous complaint against Microsoft.
Microsoft has scored a big customer for its Windows Live online service. Lenovo announced today that it plans to make the Live.com portal the default home page and include the Windows Live Toolbar on all its computers worldwide.
Peter Gaucher, executive director for strategic alliances at Lenovo, said the company considered alternatives, but ultimately decided in favor of Microsoft Live.
"We were looking for a portal strategy and settled on Microsoft Windows Live because of the balance and flexibility it offers," Gaucher told internetnews.com. "The other solutions are good, but force the user into a canned experience, and we wanted to offer something they could customize. Also, there's a very short list of companies who can deliver the kind of global footprint and content we were looking for."
A record 1,700 Microsoft enthusiasts and experts are meeting in Seattle this week for the annual MVP Global Summit, a chance to network with one another and with officials of the company around which many of them build their businesses and personal lives.
"Our people come here, they see the big ads -- it's like a legend," said Aurelian Verla, a director of Wygwam, a Microsoft-only consultancy based in the north of France that flew in five of its 19 employees. "It's a good investment, because the goal is to have networking with product managers and developers. That's something we can't do in France," he said.
Microsoft Tuesday began shipping the second service pack for Windows Server 2003. Dubbed Service Pack 2, or SP2, it will be the last service pack for the aging Windows Server 2003 before the company ships its putative replacement -- Windows Server "Longhorn" -- the end of the year.
The company shipped the release candidate for SP2 in late November so the final release had been expected. Versions of SP2 for both 32-bit and 64-bit releases of Windows Server 2003 are available. Additionally, SP2 supports all editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 Release 2, Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, and Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2.
At its annual Convergence conference in San Diego March 11-14, Microsoft will make a plethora of announcements around its Dynamics brand of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management suites, from the release of Titan, its multitenant version of Dynamics CRM, to something called Sure Step, a family of model-driven configuration, implementation and migration tools that make system migration and configuration easier for users to manage, across all four ERP suites.
But what's really being previewed at Convergencea Dynamics platform strategymay go officially unannounced. "The big news at Convergence is that Microsoft is standardizing the platform and converging down to a couple products that will become the primary platform for Dynamics. But you won't hear them say that," said Yvonne Genovese, an analyst with Gartner Group.
Microsoft is close to acquiring privately held Tellme Networks, a maker of products that bridge the worlds of speech recognition and the Internet, CNET News.com has learned.
The deal is expected to be completed and announced later this week, according to sources familiar with the companies' plans.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Tellme is best known for its service that lets people get Internet information over the telephone, but the company also has a variety of services that businesses can use to offer automated data and directory assistance information via the phone.
Peter Jackson, auteur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, is reported to have signed on with Microsoft to create two interactive series for the Xbox 360 to be released in episodic format. According to a piece from gaming blog Joystiq, reporting from Wednesday's second annual "Blogger Breakfast" event at GDC, one of the series will be based on the Halo franchise while the other will be a brand new IP.
Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Game Studios, was on hand at the event to reveal the news, stating that Jackson's two projects are still in the very early stages of the design phase. However, he also hopes that they will set a standard for other Microsoft developers to follow, confirming that the company is backing the idea of episodic content on the Xbox 360 wholeheartedly.
Having conquered the desktop, Microsoft now has its eye on your telephone.
The software maker last year set out its ambition to become a serious player in the telephony market, announcing plans to turn its corporate instant-messaging software into a program that can also manage telephone functions.
Jeff Raikes, the veteran Microsoft executive who helped establish Office as one of the company's most profitable products, recently stepped in to take over leadership of the telephony business. Raikes says his unit's investment in telephony research and development is second only to the R&D investment in Office itself.
Microsoft announced on Thursday that it landed Quest Software as its first licensee in a protocol technology program formed following action by European antitrust regulators.
The program, which stems from the European Commission's historic March 2004 order, requires Microsoft to license its protocol technology at "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" terms. A goal of the program is to provide all licensees, even Microsoft rivals, with the ability to create server-based products that will interoperate with Microsoft's technology.
After spending his morning testifying before Congress about America's shortcomings in the global competitiveness race, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates concluded his policy trip to Washington Wednesday night by calling for a uniform national privacy standard.
Keynoting a dinner hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology, Gates said consumers deserve laws that provide personal control over the data collected about them and transparency about how the data is collected.
"A uniform privacy law would be a strong milestone," Gates told almost 1,000 diners that included top officials from the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.