Internet companies including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are protesting new federal legislation that would not strictly regulate how broadband operators can organize their network.
In a letter to Congress on Tuesday, the companies told Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, that his bill to revamp telecommunications laws "would fail to protect the Internet." Barton is the chairman of the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.
Instead of bowing to requests from Internet businesses, Barton sided with one of Washington's most potent lobbying forces: telecommunications companies, including DSL and cable providers, that spread around far more money in political circles.
Microsoft has delayed until early 2007 an update for Microsoft Virtual Server, a technology that lets a computer run multiple incarnations of Windows simultaneously.
The SP1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel's Virtualization and Advanced Micro Devices' Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.
The postponement comes on the heels of Microsoft's delays of Windows Vista and Office 2007. "Quality always takes priority over timeline," the Microsoft representative said.
The software-as-a-service paradigm is expected to take center stage at Microsoft's Convergence conference, kicking off this weekend in Dallas.
At the company's annual conference for Microsoft Business Solutions customers and partners, executives with the Redmond software giant are on tap to highlight everything from Microsoft's hosted CRM plans, to its evolving strategy to add Web services to its existing ERP and CRM wares.
That product, code-named "Titan," and/or Microsoft CRM 4.0, is expected to provide true multi-tenancy capabilities, enabling Microsoft and other hosters to provision multiple customer accounts on a single server. That capability, if and when introduced, would put Microsoft more squarely in Salesforce.com's camp.
In some ways, Bill Gates' son is not that different than other youngsters. He spends hours on automotive Web sites and pines for his first car.
Of course, one difference is, he's only six.
Gates said his son has spent so much time on Ford's site that the carmaker has identified him as a top prospect. His 9-year-old daughter, meanwhile, is most often looking at pets that might make good additions to the family.
Gates said he only narrowly avoided adding rabbits to his household. He didn't say what creature she ended up with, but he did say he steered her toward "a less difficult pet experience." In a nod to dad, the Gates kids do their research with MSN.
Microsoft Monday released a new version of its BizTalk Server integration software to manufacturing.
BizTalk Server 2006, software for integrating business processes across the enterprise through XML, will be generally available to customers on May 1, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management.
One of the biggest differences between the new version and its former release BizTalk Server 2004 is the pricing and packaging.
Microsoft is including 14 technology adapters that connect BizTalk Server 2006 to back-end applications such as PeopleSoft and Oracle Application Suite, Martin said. As a result, the pricing for the enterprise edition of the product has increased from US$25,000 per CPU to $29,999, he said.
Microsoft has established a public database to allow Internet Explorer users to report bugs in the Web browser.
To post or view bugs, users must sign up for a Passport account on the Microsoft Connect Web site. Microsoft plans to allow non-registered users to view reported bugs in a couple of months, according to a post on the Internet Explorer Weblog.
The company said it opened up the site in response to user feedback. "Many customers have asked us about having a better way to enter IE bugs. It is asked, "Why don't you have Bugzilla like Firefox or other groups do?" said the Microsoft blog post.
A Texas lawyer has lost a patent lawsuit over antipiracy technology embedded in Microsoft's product activation program.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court's decision, which said that Microsoft did not infringe on Kenneth Nash's patent for detecting pirated software by assigning each program a unique ID and verifying it over the Internet.
The dispute involves patent 6,449,645. It describes how to collect the unique ID--such as a serial number or activation key--assigned to each computer in an Internet database, preferably without the user's knowledge, and checking for multiple copies of the same program running. That could let it flag two friends who were illegally running, say, a video game with the same activation key.
In a move some think has the potential to stall the adoption of OpenDocument Format as an international standard, Microsoft has joined a group that takes part in the International Organization for Standardization voting process to standardize ODF.
Microsoft has joined the V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface group within the International Committee for Information Technology Standards, a Washington-based organization. INCITS is involved in recommending what technologies should become ISO standards, and the V1 Text Processing group in particular deals with office document formats.
While Microsoft's Office team will miss Office development chief Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky, the unit won't go astray without its head taskmaster.
Microsoft Business Division Jeff Raikes -- who is addressed the 7,000 Microsoft customers and partners attending the company's Convergence conference here on March 26, -- told Microsoft Watch that he expects to announce Sinofsky's successor some time "in the next few months." While Raikes wouldn't name names, the new Office chief will come from inside Microsoft, he said.
Microsoft filed a formal appeal of South Korea's Fair Trade Commission antitrust ruling that, like the European Union, demands two versions of Windows for consumers.
The move follows a preliminary government edict from last February, which finalized an earlier ruling imposing a nearly $32 million fine, plus demands the software giant offer two versions of its Windows operating system.
Already embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit with European regulators, Microsoft said the Korean ruling would stifle competition and possibly take Windows out of the hands of consumers.