Aiming to stir up the same kind of momentum as his Internet Tidal Wave memo of a decade earlier, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has penned a memo outlining the challenges Microsoft faces from a host of online competitors.
"This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Gates said in an Oct. 30 e-mail to top Microsoft employees, which was seen by CNET News.com. "We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us."
In the memo, Gates cites an earlier missive from Ray Ozzie, outlining the importance of tapping online advertising and services as new revenue sources.
Microsoft Research has developed a prototype of a microkernel operating system, code-named 'Singularity.' Its most surprising feature: It has nothing to do with Windows.
Contrary to popular opinion, Windows isn't the only operating system in which Microsoft is investing.
The Microsoft Research team has built from scratch a 300,000-line, microkernel-based operating system that has no roots in Windows.
That OS, code-named "Singularity," is slowly but steadily gaining visibility. The Microsoft Research team behind the project recently posted to the Web a 44-page technical research report about Singularity. Company officials discussed the project publicly at the June USENIX conference. And earlier this week, Microsoft's Singularity effort got some attention on Slashdot.
While developers are busy this week digesting the new features and upgrades in Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft already is looking ahead to the next version of the product.
Rick LaPlante, general manager of Visual Studio 2005 Team System at Microsoft, said that because Visual Studio 2005 is shipping this week, the company has begun working on a prototype of the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas.
And while there is much planning and work to be done before ramping up development for Orcas, one area Microsoft is clearly looking to cover in the next version of its Visual Studio Team System life-cycle development suite is testing, said LaPlante.
Microsoft has renamed its still-in-beta Windows AntiSpyware as "Microsoft Defender," a company official disclosed Friday, who also said that new spyware definitions would be pushed to users via Windows Update when the product goes final.
The new name, said Jason Garms, the group program manager for Microsoft's anti-malware team, "is about what Windows will do for customers, defending them from spyware and other unwanted software." Garms announced the new brand name on the team's blog.
"Weve always said we will provide visibility and control, as well as protection, detection and removal from other potentially unwanted software, including rootkits, keystroke loggers and more," added Garms.
I've been hearing for some time that Microsoft plans to fete the launch of the Xbox 360 with a big desert celebration. Until now, though, I hadn't heard anything definitive.
But now comes word, via ActiveWin, of something a little more specific.
According to the site, Microsoft is planning a giant event in the desert--"Burning Man meets E3"-- where a whole bunch of selected game players will get to be among the first to get their hands on the new console.
It's supposed to be, or so I hear, a 24-hour event scheduled for either Nov. 21 or Nov. 22. And it should be somewhere in the south or central California desert.
Microsoft has emerged as the front-runner in talks surrounding the potential sale of a stake in America Online.
Several issues could delay any potential transaction. The New York Times reports one issue is whether such an alliance would be another risky partnership for Time Warner Inc. The company is also looking at whether a new partner at AOL could help Time Warner navigate the digital world.
Microsoft approached AOL several months ago to discuss joint ventures, but any agreement is still likely weeks away.
The Revolutionary War started in Massachusetts, and now the state is firing some opening rounds in a revolt against Microsoft that seeks an open, proprietary-free format for storing electronic documents.
Gov. Mitt Romney's administration has directed state government's executive offices to begin storing new records by Jan. 1, 2007, in a format that challenges Microsoft's market-dominating Office software, which isn't yet designed to support the new standard.
Massachusetts is the first state to take the step, but others are closely watching the fight.
Setting the stage for a showdown with two of its biggest rivals, Microsoft will release an overhauled version of its corporate database program today, trying to move further into the territory of Oracle and IBM.
The program, SQL Server 2005, aims to give Microsoft a larger role on the behind-the- scenes computer servers that store and manage data for big businesses. Although much of the company's past focus has been on small and medium businesses, Microsoft says it has made a series of improvements to better suit SQL Server for large-scale uses, too.
Efforts to establish national standards for protecting computer data received a boost Thursday when Microsoft announced support for the idea.
Microsoft, the world's biggest computer software maker, did not endorse a specific bill but said a single national standard is better than the complex and sometimes contradictory patchwork approach now in place around the country.
Congress has a number of proposals aimed at ensuring companies meet a certain standard for computer security and that they disclose when hackers have obtained customers' information. But no comprehensive legislation has been proposed.
Windows and Office Live offerings seem so unnecessary. Web type application will always be inferior to rich client applications; there is no reason to kill MSN, instead concentrate on making Windows OS the best platform to write great software.
Anyone still remember when Netscape was Microsoft's big boogeyman about ten years ago? When Microsoft completely rearchitected Internet Explorer 4.0 to meet some crazy Netscape desktop replacement solution that never even appeared? The results of that work continue to haunt Microsoft's users today: Windows was melded with IE, the IE shell replaced Explorer, and HTML was suddenly everywhere in the OS; all of these moves provided hackers with countless new ways to surreptitiously enter our PCs and compromise them to their own evil ends. And these attacks continue today: Every month, it seems, a new patch is released for a critical IE security vulnerability. Well, good news, Windows users. Microsoft is at it again. And this time, the supposed competitor is Google, a company that dabbles in Windows software but is really best known for Web-based services. As with Netscape, Microsoft wants to stop Google at all costs, and it's already taken a page from its original Netscape competition playbook by starting to copy every single feature Google offers. And now, it's killing MSN to meld all those services into Windows. You can sort of see where this is headed. Unless Microsoft realizes the insanity of what it's doing, the software giant is heading toward a downward spiral that can only result in products and services no one is asking for, all seamless integrated with its dominant PC-based products. Please, Microsoft. Take a step back and think about what you're doing here. Your history speaks for itself. It's not a pretty story for you or your customers.