Users who put their faith in Vista's new security features and Microsoft's Windows Defender antispyware product may find themselves
under attack from spyware all the same, according to the results of a study by Webroot, a leading antispyware vendor and Microsoft
competitor.
On Thursday, the company released the results of what it claimed was a two-week study of Windows Defender that showed the
product missed 84 percent of a sample set of 25 spyware and malicious code samples. The programs that slipped by were a mix
of spyware, Trojan horse programs, and keyloggers. While many were not Vista compatible and simply crashed, others were able
to install on Vista systems, said Gerhard Eschelbeck, Chief Technology Officer at Webroot.
Microsoft is continuing to lose market share in the search business to industry rival Google, something the software maker's financial chief said Thursday he is "not happy" about.
And things aren't expected to turn around any time soon. Microsoft said Thursday that its Internet services business will produce less sales growth over the next two quarters than the company had previously forecast.
Where it once forecast that revenue might grow by as much as 11 percent, the company now sees full-year sales growth in its Internet services business of just 3 percent to 8 percent.
While Microsoft managed to post record quarterly revenue of $12.54 billion for the second quarter of its fiscal year, which ended Dec. 31, exceeding even the high end of its own projections, it also recorded a 28 percent fall in quarterly net profit after deferring some $1.6 billion in revenue.
The Redmond, Wash., software company, which released its second quarter results Jan. 25 after the financial markets in New York had closed for the day, posted operating income of $3.47 billion for the quarter under review, with net income coming in at $2.63 billion and diluted earnings of $0.26 a share.
Led by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Google's Eric Schmidt, the U.S. high-tech industry is well represented at the World Economic Forum, which opens Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.
The event offers business and political leaders an opportunity to schmooze in a mountainous setting, and it gives executives like Gates and Schmidt -- fierce competitors in their daily business lives -- the chance to let their hair down.
This year, discussion will focus on what organizers are calling the "Shifting Power Equation" by identifying business shifts that climate change could cause.
There's a reason Steve Ballmer runs around screaming about developers.
When Windows Vista has its mainstream launch next week, much of the attention will be on what users can expect out of the box. But perhaps more important to its ultimate success are a host of new technologies that are built in to Vista, but only come alive once applications are written that take advantage of them.
Included in this camp are a new peer-to-peer file-sharing service, a new graphics technology, and a built-in system for searching and tagging information. Some early programs offer a hint of these abilities, but many applications that really will harness Vista are still in the early development stages or have yet to be written.
A number of innovations in the upcoming Windows Vista and Office 2007 products were initially conceived of in Microsoft Research, whose teams then worked closely with the individual product groups to make these technologies viable for inclusion in shipping products.
Among the contributions made by Microsoft Research are the new desktop search, Sidebar and SuperFetch features in Vista, and the new ribbon-based user interface in Office 2007.
One of the new features that has been widely touted by Microsoft executives, including Jim Allchin, the co-president of the Platforms and Services division, and CEO Steve Ballmer, is desktop search, which was conceptualized some five years ago by Susan Dumais, the principal researcher of Microsoft Research's Adaptive Systems and Interaction group.
Today, Microsoft announced that it will double the support life cycle for the consumer versions of Windows XP to 10 years to match the support life cycle for XP Professional, the business version of XP. This change affects both XP Home Edition and XP Media Center Edition, Microsoft said.
"With the addition of Extended Support, the support life cycle for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition will include a total of five years of Mainstream Support and five years of Extended Support, matching the support policy provided for Windows XP Professional," a Microsoft statement about the change reads.
Microsoft is extending its branch office promotion to enterprises with a large number of remote branch sites, with discounts as deep as 43 percent, the company announced Wednesday.
The Microsoft Branch Infrastructure Enterprise Solution bundle is a promotional SKU for customers that need enterprise-class support for branch offices.
The promotional offer will run from Feb. 1, 2007, through Jan. 31, 2008, according to company statements. It will include Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Enterprise Edition, and Virtual Server 2005 R2. It also will include Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007 Enterprise Operations Management License and Systems Management Server 2003 R2 Server Configuration Management License.
As part of Microsoft's push to get customers onto Windows Vista, anyone with a mobile PC running Vista can get free wireless access at T-Mobile HotSpots in North America over the next three months.
As I was surfing around the Web today, I browsed over to the Windows Vista blog where I found the post about the free T-Mobile Wi-Fi offer.
This is what the post, by Microsoft Product Manager Nick White, says: "Take your mobile PC running Windows Vista to any North American T-Mobile HotSpot between 30th January and 30th April for a complimentary, blazing-fast broadband connection.
Seems that the new Windows PowerShell commad line shell and scripting language will be compatible with Vista in time for the product's launch next week.
Windows PowerShell, which released to the Web last November, is the new command line shell and scripting language designed to help IT professionals become more productive and more in control of system administration.
There was a bit of a stir when customers and the press found out that PowerShell, along with a number of other Microsoft products, was not compatible with Vista, and Microsoft has certainly done the right thing by ensuring it now is.