As Sony and Nintendo unveiled new details about their upcoming game consoles this week, Microsoft tried to build momentum for its existing Xbox 360 by announcing new games and initiatives.
Peter Moore, the executive in charge of Microsoft's Xbox business, discussed the company's strategy and the competitive landscape in an interview with the Seattle P-I Thursday at the E3 video-game convention.
The U.S. government has given its thumbs-up to Microsoft's search box plans for Vista, shrugging off the same concerns raised recently by Google.
While criticizing Microsoft for its implementation of its existing antitrust accord, regulators appear satisfied with the software maker's plans for Windows Vista, including a new search box that is part of Internet Explorer 7.
As part of its status report on Microsoft's antitrust compliance, the Justice Department said that it had reviewed the search box and concluded that Microsoft's implementation "respects users' and (computer maker's) default choices and is easily changed."
Google had recently cried foul over the box, which is set to conduct Web searches from a specified engine, while CEO Steve Ballmer this week defended Microsoft's approach.
Having received an invitation to join a group of companies working to improve the AJAX development experience, Microsoft is mulling over how it might work with the collaboration of companies known as the OpenAJAX initiative.
In an interview with eWEEK on May 11, Brian Goldfarb, lead product manager for Web Platform and Tools at Microsoft, said the software giant is open to having a dialogue with the group of companies pursuing an open-standards approach to AJAX.
"The idea of open collaboration around AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a great thing," Goldfarb said. "That's what we're focusing on ourselveslook at the work we've done with Atlas." Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX development framework.
Seattle PI
Microsoft sought to strengthen its video-game muscle Tuesday, announcing a new installment in the lucrative "Halo" series, a deal with an industry powerhouse, an updated forecast for Xbox 360 sales and a plan to connect its game-console and PC Windows businesses.
The company even brought out Bill Gates to take part.
As part of the appearance -- his first ever at the E3 video-game show -- Gates introduced an initiative called "Live Anywhere" that will expand the Xbox Live online system to mobile phones and the next Windows operating system. It means, among other things, that Xbox 360 gamers will be able to play online against people using Windows PCs.
Ever-creative Intel this week announced that it will continue its boring naming strategy from the past and simply call the second generation Core Duo microprocessors, which had been codenamed Merom and Conroe, as Core 2 Duo. There'll even be a Core 2 Duo Extreme version, in case you were nervous that name was going away too. The desktop version of the chip (which had been named Conroe) and the notebook version (Merom) will both become available later this year, Intel says. Expect to see them by the third quarter of 2006 at the latest. Intel is also working on quad-core CPUs, which could arrive as early as 2007.
Google seems to want special treatment on Internet Explorer, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
His remarks centered on the default search engine in the Web browser. Right now, when people update their version of IE to IE 7, the software won't change their default search settings. "If you pick Yahoo, it will stay on Yahoo," Ballmer said in a hallway conversation Thursday, after a speech he gave at the Churchill Club here.
Google, however, has complained about how the system works. The complaints could be taken as a disguised way to help that company grow its segment in search, Ballmer suggested.
Researchers from Microsoft's anti-malware engineering team are working on an automated way to sort through the thousands of malware families and variants attacking Windows computers.
The company unveiled its plans at the EICAR (European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research) conference in Hamburg, Germany, proposing the use of distance measure and machine learning technologies to come up with automatic classification of viruses, Trojans, spyware, rootkits and other malicious software programs.
Microsoft has completely rebuilt Windows CE 6 with a new kernel, and the OS can now support as many as 32,000 simultaneous processes--a huge jump from the previous limit of 32 processes. Each software process can use its own 2GB address space, Microsoft says. These changes--along with the ability for developers to use a Visual Studio 2005 plug-in to target Windows CE 6 applications--will make Windows CE 6 more viable for next-generation devices, such as set-top boxes, GPS-based mobile phones, PDAs, and various vertical devices that target markets such as industrial automation.
Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it will continue to patch third-party products that impact Windows.
Tuesday, Microsoft pushed out a patch to Windows XP, 98, and Millennium users for Flash Player, an Adobe-owned multimedia application that's bundled with those operating systems. It was the first time that the Redmond, Wash. developer had issued an update for a non-Microsoft product using its Windows Update service.
A Microsoft spokesman explained the decision Tuesday afternoon by saying that "Flash Player is a third-party technology that is redistributed by Microsoft in certain versions of Windows, therefore some Microsoft customers may be at risk.
NTT DoCoMo and Microsoft are working together to make cell phones compatible with the large number of online music stores that use Microsoft's technology, they said Thursday.
DoCoMo, which is Japan's leading cell phone operator, will begin adding support for the Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 system to its cell phones, starting with the F902iS handset that will go on sale in the middle of this year. DRM is used to protect downloaded songs from being copied and most online music stores use Microsoft's technology. Without DRM support the phones wouldn't be able to play tracks purchased online.