Determined to break into the telecom market, Microsoft announced on Wednesday an agreement with France Telecom to develop products and services. Initially the two companies will work together on two projects, one for VoIP and the other a software project that would combine voice, video and data services.
At a press conference in Paris, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters that "the first product would be available within a year," although his assessment may be a bit optimistic.
One week after confirming a code execution flaw in its flagship Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft has shipped a "killbit" package to disable the affected control, javaprxy.dll.
The killbit, also known as a registry key update, is one of seven pre-patch workarounds in a revised security bulletin released by software engineers at the Microsoft Security Response Center.
Since the advisory was first issued on June 30, Microsoft has pushed out two revisions with new information to counter the public release of exploit code on security Web sites and mailing lists.
Microsoft released a patch Tuesday that fixes a memory leak problem that has frustrated users of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Microsoft said the problem resulted from a memory leak in the Tablet PC operating system's tcserver.exe service.
According to Microsoft, a certain subset of usersthose who do not power down their Tablet PCs every day or every other dayhave found that memory can "leak" through the stylus, causing a degradation of system performance.
"In other words, the stylus sucks up all the juice, and when it gets bad enough, the operating system issues a GPF General Protection Fault that causes the system to crash, boom, and you have to reboot," said Yankee Group Research Inc. senior analyst Laura DiDio.
Arthur Sorkin has been courted by Microsoft twice now, and both times the computer scientist has been put off by the software giant's approach.
Sorkin, who holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, said he first received an unsolicited invitation to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters in about 2000, on the recommendation of a senior Microsoft manager.
But rather than attempt to win him over as a prize prospect--Sorkin specializes in operating system design and computer security, among other areas--Microsoft interviewers challenged him with a technical "pop quiz," he recalled. No one tried to sell him on either the company or the job, he said. He withdrew his application.
Microsoft said its willingness to file patents on its planned Indigo Web-services technology will not affect the software's ability to interoperate with other vendors' software. Developers, meanwhile, will not need to pay license fees to build an application that calls on Indigo, the company added.
Planned for inclusion in the Longhorn client version of Windows in 2006, Microsoft bills Indigo as a new breed of communications infrastructure based on Web services, with interoperability being a key attribute. Asked if the company planned to seek patents on Indigo, the company responded in a prepared statement.
Microsoft Tuesday dribbled out more details of the planned Nov. 7 launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 at its TechEd 2005 Europe conference in Amsterdam.
The kickoff event will be Nov. 7 in San Francisco, followed by more than 90 events in 50 countries through the rest of the month, said Andy Lees, corporate vice president of Server and Tools Marketing, in his keynote address at the conference.
One Microsoft partner expects that while Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will be available at launch time, BizTalk Server 2006 likely will be in beta with the full release available next year. "Don't expect it to come out in November," said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for New York-based consulting firm and Microsoft partner Citigate Hudson.
Microsoft released details of the long-awaited update to its customer relationship management software on Tuesday, adding a slew of new tools and making the system available via the on-demand applications delivery model.
The unveiling of the new applications set, which will be known as Microsoft CRM 3.0, is being made in conjunction with the software giant's Tech Ed 2005 conference in Europe and its Worldwide Partner Conference 2005 in the United States, both of which are being held later this week.
Describing a future where everyone and every system is highly connected through wireless devices and Web services, Bill Gates said Friday there is still room for improvements in search engines and the Internet.
Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect was speaking before a conference hall here packed with over 7,000 IT professionals, government officials and students. Gates is in Singapore for the day, following a trip to Thailand.
Microsoft at its annual Professional Developers Conference in September will debut a new object-oriented framework aimed at simplifying the development of client-side browser applications.
The new framework, code-named Atlas, combines technology available in previous versions of Internet Explorer that allowed Web-page updates to run in the background, rather than making continuous calls to the server to refresh a page, said Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of the platform strategy group at Microsoft.
An antitrust complaint with something favorable to say about Microsoft? Is it possible? Apparently so. The antitrust suit filed last week against microprocessor giant Intel by its smaller rival, Advanced Micro Devices, singles out Microsoft for its willingness to support an innovative processor that AMD pioneered.
From the outside, it might seem surprising that the AMD suit doesn't instead criticize Microsoft, given its close ties with Intel as part of what many call the "Wintel" partnership. But the situation illustrates the fact that the interests of Microsoft and Intel aren't always tightly aligned.