Hewlett-Packard Co. has dropped its exclusive support for the Blu-ray high-definition DVD recording standard, pledging to support both Blu-ray Disc and a rival standard known as HD-DVD, the company announced Friday.
HP decided to support HD-DVD after the Blu-ray Disc Association declined to support a home networking technology that HP had advocated, the company said in a press release. In addition to pledging its support, HP has joined the HD-DVD Promotions Group.
The company wanted the Blu-ray association to include two standards, Mandatory Managed Copy and iHD, supported by HD-DVD.
Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are discontinuing the UDDI Business Registry project for Web services on January 12, according to Web-based bulletins from the three companies.
UDDI prescribes a specification for setting up directories of Web services for both public and within-the-firewall usage.
Questions have long been raised about its success, and the move by the three vendors would at face value appear to bear out the negative reviews. But the shutdown is not being positioned this way.
Microsoft's up-and-down courtship of America Online fell short Friday -- dealing a major setback to the Redmond company's online ambitions at the hands of rival Google Inc.
After months of talks, America Online parent Time Warner Inc. moved to complete a deal with Google instead. The search leader is expected to broaden its existing relationship with AOL by paying $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in the Time Warner unit, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and others reported, citing anonymous sources.
And speaking of video game sales, Microsoft announced this week that it is "on track" to sell 3 million Xbox 360 consoles within the first 90 days of the system's availability. While the company wouldn't say how many consoles have been sold so far, Microsoft did note that 1.3 million video game titles have been sold for the system since November 18. I guess that's not too shabby, given the console availability problems that have dogged potential Xbox 360 customers. But it pales in the face of the millions of previous generation Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube consoles and games that will be sold by the end of the year as well.
Testers are receiving their invites for the next version of Microsoft's consumer instant-messaging service. It's still unclear whether this version supplants Windows Messenger, but it is certain that it will provide additional VOIP support.
Microsoft is expected to make available to testers this week the first beta version of its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service.
According to a posting on the MSN Messenger enthusiast site Mess.be, Microsoft will launch the first Windows Live Messenger beta test on Tuesday, December 13.
Microsoft has extended an olive branch in announcing on Wednesday on the Team RSS Blog that it will adopt the same orange RSS icon used in Mozilla Corporation's Firefox browser.
Two months ago, Microsoft's announcement that it planned to redesign the RSS icon set off a ferocious debate. Microsoft posted a number of icon redesign suggestions, asking the community for its input. This week, Microsoft went public with its plans.
More than a year after Microsoft shipped Windows XP Service Pack 2 as a massive security-centric OS makeover, customer adoption internationally continues to lag at disappointing levels, according to a senior Redmond executive.
Stuart McKee, Microsoft's U.S. National Technology Officer, said the overall install rate of XP SP2 was just shy of 70 percent, but in countries such as Spain and Korea, adoption of the service pack dips into the 50 percent range. In Japan, Germany and France, the install rate is in the range of 75 percent, McKee said.
Microsoft's board increased the company's quarterly dividend by a penny to $0.09 a share. Companies often raise dividends to make their shares attractive as they enter periods of slower growth, but Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell billed the move as continuing the process of returning cash to shareholders. Last year, the company reduced its cash hoard by $44 billion with various shareholder payouts.
"We remain confident in our growth prospects and have an exciting product line-up, which includes major releases like Xbox 360, SQL Server 2005, Office 12 and Windows Vista," Liddell said in a statement Wednesday.
Microsoft took another step down the path of service-enabling its enterprise applications with the release of Dynamics SL 6.5 Thursday. The upgraded suite brings more personalization features, bank account management capabilities and tighter integration with Officeparticularly Outlook, according to Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch newsletter.
SL 6.5, formerly known as MBS Solomonone of four ERP suites under the Microsoft Business Solutions umbrellais the first release from this particular suite to take on Dynamics' attributes: service enablement, roles-based user interfaces and an integration with Microsoft's "classic" technologies.
Microsoft filed 10 lawsuits in federal court accusing three companies and nine individuals of illegally selling Microsoft software.
The lawsuits, unveiled Thursday, involve companies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Microsoft accused:
Comp-Discounts Software in Boca Raton, Fla. of distributing counterfeit copies of Windows 98 and Office 2000 Professional
Auction Hut of Toledo, Ohio, of distributing counterfeit copies of Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 Professional.
Computer Techs of Grove City, Pa., of distributing counterfeit copies of Windows XP Professional, Office XP Professional and Money 2004.