It's just days before the consumer launch of Windows Vista, and by now most everyone has heard about Vista's new and improved Aero user interface, desktop search, security and various multimedia enhancements.
But there's far more to Vista than the features consumers will experience when they use the OS. Five years in the making, Vista -- an evolutionary move rather than a revolutionary one -- has broad implications for Microsoft. Inside Vista are clues about the future of Windows and how Microsoft plans to position its number-one core product going forward.
With some Vista reviewers and early users clamoring for more, there is one group that wants less from the new operating system: Microsoft competitors.
Today, ECIS (European Committee for Interoperable Systems) again charged that Windows Vista would stifle innovation and competition. The group, founded in 1989, represents a Who's Who list of Microsoft competitors, including Adobe, Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat and Sun. Many of these same companies are Microsoft partners, too.
Back in November, I predicted about Office 2007 and Windows Vista: "Competitors aren't done complaining to European regulators about either product. Their clamoring will continue and maybe even increase ahead of Windows Vista's consumer launch in January."
Bungled branding of the new Windows Live Internet services has hurt Microsoft and could affect its chance to play catch-up with Google, analysts said on Friday.
On Thursday, Microsoft lowered its sales forecast for its Internet services business for the full year from 11 percent to between 3 percent and 8 percent. It also acknowledged that its search market share has dropped. Windows Live Search saw its searches drop nearly 10 percent from a year ago, while Google's rose more than 22 percent, according to figures released this week from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google has 50.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo at 23.6 percent and Microsoft with only 8.4 percent.
Microsoft is looking to supplant the ubiquitous JPEG with an image format of its own--and it's hoping the debut of Windows Vista will help do the job.
In 2006, Microsoft began promoting its own image standard, formerly called Windows Media Photo but renamed HD Photo in November. The company makes no bones about its ambitions: "Our ultimate goal is that it does become the de facto standard people are using for digital photos," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism.
Microsoft announced Friday that it will launch a Starter edition of the Windows Vista operating system, geared toward customers in developing countries.
Called Windows Vista Starter, it is similar in concept to the Windows XP Starter Edition that Microsoft announced in June 2003: a version of the operating system that can run on lower-end processors, in numerous languages, with extra tutorials bundled for customers who may be using PCs for the first time. Starter Edition will be released Tuesday, alongside Vista's other consumer versions.
Barely a week after a U.S. judge approved a landmark antitrust agreement with Microsoft, company executives were swapping e-mails suggesting Dell deserved a beating for its growing interest in Linux, according to documents filed with a state court.
But Redmond representatives said Friday that the 2002 exchange, made public this week as part of an antitrust suit unfolding in Iowa state court, only tells part of the story. They said it omits evidence that Microsoft executives were simultaneously seeking legal advice on how to ensure they were responding to such competitive threats without shirking their antitrust responsibilities.
A German court has sentenced a software dealer to nearly three years in prison for distributing Microsoft products with
forged licenses.
The dealer, a 42-year-old Turk, was arrested in June 2006 by German police for selling Microsoft products with falsified licenses
on a large scale, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH said Thursday. He had been held in custody until the court ruling, which ended
with a sentence of two years, 11 months in prison.
After eight days of hearings, the district court in Bochum, Germany, found the Turkish dealer guilty of reselling 18,555 products
with forged licenses to other dealers who were unaware of the illegal activity. The court referred to the dealer as a "clever
offender" who was driven by greed. The dealer was not identified.
Microsoft is shipping a Firefox plug-in version of its Photosynth 3D photo processing software technology preview.
First demonstrated last year, Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-dimensional space. Up until now, however, it was a Microsoft Internet Explorer-only browser application.
"After we released the technology preview in November we saw a number of requests for a version that would work in Firefox," Adam Sheppard, group product manager for Live Labs said in a blog post this week. "Live Labs is committed to making our technologies available to the widest possible audience, and today we're happy to announce the availability of the Photosynth Firefox plugin.
Windows Vista is almost here. To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista, and below are my top 15 favorites.
1. It's the Interface, Stupid
Perhaps the best thing about Windows Vista is the most obvious: its new interface. With transparent animated windows that swoosh into place, subtle and elegant colors, a new Start menu, and plenty of other changes, this is the most beautiful version of Windows you've seen. If you've ever had Mac envy, this is the Windows you want--it's the most Mac-like interface yet.
About half of the downloads claiming to be free versions of Microsoft's Vista operating system are actually malicious Trojan horse software, security vendor DriveSentry warned Thursday.
With Vista's consumer launch just days away, hackers have been bombarding discussion boards with offers of "cracked" versions
of Windows Vista, which are typically being distributed on peer-to-peer networks, said John Lynch, vice president of sales
and marketing for DriveSentry.
These posts offer downloads of the operating system that skip Vista's activation process, created by Microsoft to prevent
users from running illegal copies.