Microsoft reminded solution providers and end users Wednesday that support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 will end Oct. 10.
Customers running Windows XP SP1 must migrate to Windows XP SP2 over the next three months, or they will lose incident support. Microsoft also said it won't release any more security updates for SP1 after that date.
During its monthly security briefing, Microsoft executives told customers to prepare their migrations over the summer. "I urge all customers to have plans ready for moving to XP SP2 as soon as possible," said Stephen Toulouse, a security product manager at Microsoft.
A Microsoft program manager on Thursday pulled a blog entry in which he had claimed that Windows Vista's many delays have been due to overly complicated code and a corporate culture that impose deadlines so unrealistic that slipping is inevitable.
Philip Su, who managed development teams in the Windows group for five years -- and who still works for the Redmond, Wash. company -- called out code interdependencies, an overbearing process that slows down developers, and a culture that forces managers to lie to superiors as the faults that have made Vista the slowest-moving software project in Microsoft's history.
A Web site that had been serving up Windows Vista Beta 2 via BitTorrent has stopped distributing the preview after receiving a cease-and-desist e-mail from Microsoft, the site operators announced Thursday.
Windows enthusiasts Jake Ludington and Chris Pirillo had set up VistaTorrent.com to help Microsoft get Beta 2 in users' hands, the pair said earlier this week.
Microsoft saw it differently.
"We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," read the text of the Microsoft e-mail Ludington and Pirillo posted on the site.
One of the main strategists behind Microsoft's moves into console gaming and home-entertainment PCs is leaving the company after 16 years.
Ted Hase, one of the early leaders of the teams that led to Microsoft's Xbox console and Media Center PC software, confirmed Wednesday that this will be his last week at Microsoft. He said he is weighing various job possibilities, but he declined to name any companies where he might land.
It's the latest in a series of high-profile departures from Microsoft. But Hase, 47, spoke highly of Microsoft and said he simply felt it was the right time in his career to try something else.
Microsoft plans to sell financial services companies software to run trading systems in a bid to spread the use of its Windows program on more complex networks.
Microsoft will unveil a trading platform next week based on the new version of Windows for supercomputers released last week and a new Excel spreadsheet due later this year. The platform will be shown during a Securities Industry Association technology conference in New York, general manager Bill Hartnett said Wednesday.
The push to sell software for critical networks to Wall Street may help Microsoft gain ground in the market for high-performance computing. The Redmond-based company wants to win over customers who use operating systems such as Unix sold by Sun Microsystems Inc. and Linux from companies such as IBM.
Microsoft Dynamics has turned the corner.
This brand, a group of enterprise research platforms united under the Microsoft Business Solutions umbrella, has been bleeding cash and struggling to gain acceptance in the market.
Created in 2001 with the acquisition of Great Plains, and further expanded by the 2002 acquisition of Navision, MBS has been plagued by poor definition and communication of its product strategy.
But according to James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics marketing, MBS is now "on the cusp of profitability."
Utzschneider told internetnews.com that MBS finally achieved profitability in the company's second fiscal quarter of 2006.
At its annual TechEd conference in Boston Tuesday, Microsoft announced the beginning of the beta test cycle for System Center Operations Manager 2007, an update to Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.
In a move to make Windows Vista adoption more fluid, the company also announced the beta availability of the Systems Management Server 2003 Operating System Deployment Feature Pack update, which adds support for the 64-bit version of Windows XP and the Windows Vista operating systems.
"With this update, we hope to accelerate customers' deployment of both operating systems so they can more quickly benefit from new performance
and productivity enhancements," Felicity McGourty, director of product marketing in the Windows and Enterprise Management Division, said in a prepared
statement.
Hot on the heels of revelations that it is reaching out to the open-source community to find ways of interoperating with software licensed under the GPL, Microsoft announced on June 14 that it has formed an Interoperability Customer Executive Council.
The goal of the group is to identify areas for improved interoperability across not just Microsoft's products, but also the broader software industry.
Members will include CIOs and architects from both the corporate and government sectors, with Paris-based Société Générale, LexisNexis, Milwaukee-based Kohl's Illinois, the State of Delaware, Denmark's Ministry of Finance, and Spain's Generalitat de Catalunya and Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, in Madrid, already signing up as founding members.
Many Windows PCs have been turned into zombies, but rootkits are not yet widespread, according to a Microsoft security report slated for release Monday.
More than 60 percent of compromised Windows PCs scanned by Microsoft's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool between January 2005 and March 2006 were found to be running malicious bot software, the company said. The tool removed at least one version of the remote-control software from about 3.5 million PCs, it added. That's compared with an overall 5.7 million machines with infections overall.
Sitting on a trove of data, Microsoft intends to provide services designed to spot bugs and improve performance on corporate networks, a company executive said Monday.
Microsoft has made its Live online services a major focus for product development, particularly for consumers. But company executives at this week's Microsoft TechEd conference are providing clues on the hosted services they expect to offer their business customers.