After weeks of negotiations, Microsoft has suspended talks with the four major record companies over the licensing terms for a new online music-subscription service, according to music-industry people familiar with the talks.
Microsoft ended the discussions Friday, citing an impasse with the record companies over royalty rates, these people said yesterday.
Microsoft already sells song downloads on its MSN Music Internet site but had been seeking to develop a subscription service. Such services typically offer users unlimited number of tracks for download, and in some cases, for use on compatible portable music players, for a monthly fee.
Time Warner and Microsoft have restarted discussions about forming an alliance of their Internet units, America Online and MSN, the Wall Street Journal reported in its Friday editions.
Citing sources with knowledge of the discussions, the newspaper reported that the two companies are focused on ways to combine AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search engine. It isn't clear whether the talks include the possibility of merging AOL's 20.7 million dial-up customers with Microsoft's 2.7 million dial-up customers.
The next version of Microsoft Antigen, Microsoft's anti-virus and anti-spam security software for messaging and collaboration servers, will go into beta testing in the first half of next year, and customers using the product will get an extra anti-virus scanning engine developed by Microsoft at no charge.
Microsoft acquired Sybari Software Inc. in a deal announced in February that closed in June. Sybari Antigen was a cross-platform, enterprise anti-virus and anti-spam product. The anti-virus versions of the product use multiple scanning engines from major vendors, including Computer Associates, Sophos and Norman, to ensure the most comprehensive protection. Sybari did not have its own anti-virus scanning engine.
With the goal of enhancing its call center application development capabilities, Microsoft announced Thursday a technology acquisition from Unveil Technologies.
The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but Microsoft in addition to the technology buy, it also plans to retain key developers from Unveil Technologies Inc. The Unveil engineers will become part of Microsoft's Speech Server platform group.
Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., plans to integrate Unveil's Adaptive Learning and Conversation Assist components into the Speech Server platform, essentially a speech-enabled interactive voice response application platform. Speech Server brings to the table components that enable automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities.
Microsoft is at the helm of a new industry consortium aimed at uniting security vendors to work on products standardized on the Microsoft platform.
The SecureIT Alliance is comprised of a group of industry partners, including Symantec, Trend Micro Inc., McAfee Inc., RSA Security Inc., F-Secure, VeriSign Inc. and a number of other security firms.
Partner Resource Center The consortium is aimed at expanding Microsoft's security partnerships within the industry, as well as boosting its efforts with government and law enforcement agencies.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected two key Microsoft patent applications relating to its File Allocation Table file system. But Microsoft officials still hold out hope that the company ultimately will succeed in the quest to patent FAT.
In June 2004 the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) said it would re-examine the patent Microsoft holds on FAT, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.
That followed the request to re-examine the FAT patent, made in April by the Pubpat, a nonprofit public service organization that describes its mission as "protecting the public from the harms caused by wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy."
The European Commission has appointed a British cybercrime expert to assist in overseeing Microsoft's compliance with a 2004 antitrust decision.
Neil Barrett was one of several candidates put forward by Microsoft, and his role as a technical adviser to the Commission will begin immediately, the Commission said. Barrett holds visiting professorships with two UK universities and has served in senior roles in the private sector, notably a six-year stint with Groupe Bull ending in 1999.
He has appeared in court as a computer expert in a wide variety of criminal cases, run security evaluations for government and private sector organizations, and he frequently delivers talks and university seminars on computer crime and other subjects. He is also a columnist and has written five books.
Even as the SQL Server 2005 launch takes place in San Francisco Nov. 7, Microsoft will be quietly giving developers and ISVs inside details on the next version of its other major back-end server -- Exchange. Microsoft will host an Exchange "12" Developer Conference at its Redmond, Wash. campus on Nov. 7 and 8, the Microsoft Exchange team said in a blog posting on Tuesday afternoon.
"The conference will provide selected ISVs with an early look at the "E12" investment areas and will provide you with an early look at the "E12" development roadmap.
Microsoft is not going to release a version of its Office suite software for open-source rival Linux, although the company is actively studying how Linux works and how it can integrate with the platform, a Microsoft representative said Wednesday.
"The simplest way I can answer the question is that Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows," said Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the U.K. "We have no plans at this present moment in time to deploy or build a version of Microsoft Office on Linux."
Looking to blunt the success of Linux in high-performance computing, Microsoft is ramping up its commitment to make Windows a better fit for data-intensive computing grids.
Microsoft is creating a "Cluster Compute" version of Windows and intends to work more closely with grid industry standards bodies, Tony Hey, the company's corporate vice president of technical computing, said in an interview with CNET News.com on Tuesday.
Grid computing is a vague term that describes ways to make several machines work together to efficiently tackle computing jobs. The reason to use grids is to get more bang for the buck--by letting multiple applications share formerly separate resources or by automatically juggling priorities.