Microsoft is hosting some 400 of its small and midsize customers and partners at its Redmond, Wash., campus on March 14 as part of its inaugural Small Business Summit titled "Take Your Business to the Next Level."
Aside from the campus event March 14, Microsoft staff members will also host more than 40 online sessions over the rest of the week as part of the summit, for which some 10,000 people have signed up.
Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer and former executive vice president of Wal-Mart Stores, will give the opening keynote, as well as talk up its Small Business Server 2003 R2, which is due this summer and based on the Windows Server 2003 R2 operating-system build.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it has asked for a public hearing to present arguments that it is complying with the European Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling. The Commission, however, has so far denied the request.
Microsoft in a statement said that it wanted a planned two-day hearing, at which the company can present its arguments on compliance, to be open. While it was normally the Commissions policy to hold such hearings in private, Microsoft said that the hearing should be conducted in an "open forum." Such sessions are normally private to protect the party under investigation but, the statement said, Microsoft was prepared to "waive its right" to a confidential hearing to ensure a "full and fair examination of the issues of the case."
Microsoft has joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, the organization announced Tuesday. The move brings the software giant's Outlook, Exchange Server and MSN Hotmail products and services into the effort, which is dedicated to combating spam, phishing, viruses and other security threats distributed via e-mail. San Francisco-based MAAWG aims to do this by coming up with industry best practices, by evaluating anti-spam technology and by developing public policy pushes.
A couple of years ago, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates promised to crack spam. Since then, the company has developed efforts such as Sender ID and made antiphishing partnerships. As a MAAWG member, Microsoft will collaborate with network operators and technology vendors from the U.S., Canada and Europe, the group said. Existing supporters include America Online, France Telecom, Comcast and EarthLink.
Sony Computer Entertainment executives are pledging to appeal a judge's ruling that the company violated copyright law in the design of its popular PlayStation.
If the company loses that appeal, it will have to pay a $90 million fine and buy a license for the technology, or else stop selling the console, a force feedback control and some game titles.
U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken last week denied Sony's effort to dismiss the entire case, when she ruled that Sony had paid an "unreliable" witness $150,000 to give testimony that he had invented the technology first.
An overzealous Microsoft employee may have inadvertently let the cat out of the bag as to when the company plans to release Windows Vista, when he posted to a Microsoft blog on Monday stating it will come out in November.
If so, that would be a month later than the previous scuttlebutt, which had it pegged at the first week of October.
Microsoft officials could not be reached immediately for comment, but when contacted for the ?October? reports, a spokesperson called any attempt to predict delivery dates to be merely "speculation."
One year after Microsoft acquired Ray Ozzie and his Groove Networks, Bill Gates said Ozzie, who is charged with reinvigorating the software colossus' technology, is fitting in very well because in a way Ozzie was always connected to Microsoft.
"Ray has never really been an outsider," said Gates, noting that Ozzie worked on Microsoft projects as an outside developer. "Even when he was developing Notes, he was helping us improve Windows. Moreover, Ray is super well-respected inside Microsoft, just as he is throughout the industry." Gates' interview comments on Ozzie were published Monday in the Boston Globe.
Microsoft has temporarily halted development work on some aspects of its upcoming professional graphics application as it tries to bring companion tools and its next-generation Windows Vista operating system to market.
The application--called Expression Graphic Designer--was first released in test form in June last year, and is based on Expression, the tool Microsoft acquired with its 2003 purchase of Hong Kong company Creature House. But despite being widely seen as a rival for Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Illustrator products, Microsoft does not see the product as a standalone offering.
Sun Microsystems took its Web services interoperability effort, code-named Tango, to Microsoft's campus last week for another in a series of meetings where the two companies will learn to dance with one another in the Web services arena.
Microsoft hosted its second Windows Communication Foundation Interop Plug-fest with Sun last week, and at least five Sun engineers attended the three-day event on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus to test interoperability between Sun's Project Tango and WCF, said Arun Gupta, a Sun staff engineer, in a blog post. Other Sun staff participated remotely, he said.
Microsoft this week revealed that it will finally kill off its once-reviled Passport system, which is uses for universal Web logon. Well, they're not really killing it per se, they're just renaming it. In line with its other Windows Live services, Passport will be renamed to Windows Live ID, and will be used to authenticate users on Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live, MSN, and other Microsoft services. Passport was first launched way back in 1999 and was originally designed to sit at the middle of a massive suite of services, including the ill-fated "Hailstorm," an attempt by the software giant to bring universal Web logon and other Web services to businesses. But fear not, Microsoft fans, the company hasn't given up: It's developing a technology called InfoCard that, yes, will attempt to provide business users with universal Web logon. They'll get you eventually.
At least four major telecommunications carriers will be offering services on Microsoft's IPTV platform to hundreds of thousands of users by the end of the year, a Microsoft executive predicted on Friday at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.
Microsoft's quest to sign up carriers for its IPTV system had some false starts last year when some carriers who'd signed up for pilots either put off their commercial deployments or dropped out of Microsoft's early-adopter program.
Currently, AT&T, Verizon Communications and Swisscom have commercial deployments of IPTV services on Microsoft's software, said Elena Branet, senior marketing manager for EMEA for Microsoft TV. However, except for Verizon's services, which are in more than 20 U.S. markets, the deployments are limited to hundreds or at the most in the low thousands of users, she said.