Microsoft this week launched the seventh localized version of its low-cost, reduced-feature Windows XP Starter Edition designed for first-time PC buyers -- this one for Mexico.
The program is part of Microsoft's effort to increase its worldwide receipts for Windows in countries with low average household incomes where free or low-cost Linux distributions and pirated versions of Windows are formidable competitors.
The program was originally announced as a pilot program for five countries. The first three countries to be named, in August 2004, were Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Russia was next, followed by India. In April, Microsoft announced it was expanding the program to Brazil.
Microsoft on Tuesday issued what is expected to be its last significant revision of Windows 2000.
The software maker released what it calls an Update Rollup for the 5-year-old operating system, which is due to shift at the end of this month from receiving mainstream support to extended support. Microsoft does not generally add features to a product under extended support, and the Update Rollup is largely a collection of previously released patches as opposed to a batch of new features.
In addition to already released fixes, the collection "may contain fixes for non-public low- and moderate-level security issues that did not warrant individual security bulletins," a Microsoft representative said.
Microsoft's MSN Internet unit is budgeting for 47 percent growth in advertising outside the United States next financial year as it expands in countries such as China.
MSN, which runs the Hotmail e-mail service, posted its first profit in the 2004 fiscal year and has been increasing ad sales by about 50 percent "over the past few years," Dobson said. That pace of growth is unlikely to slow over the next five years, he said, because the Internet gets about 4 percent of ad spending compared with 20 percent of consumer viewing time.
Microsoft is bolstering its joint research with Japanese universities, targeting such areas as security and natural language processing, the world's largest software maker said on Tuesday.
It will set up a collaboration network on July 1, hoping to promote exchange with researchers at top schools including the University of Tokyo, often called the Harvard of Japan.
Although Microsoft has established research centers in India, Britain and China as well as California's Silicon Valley and its headquarters in Redmond, Washington State, it has not made any major research efforts in Japan, partly due to a lack of programming talent at Japanese schools.
European regulators have given Microsoft's supporters and competitors until the end of this week to respond to the company's plan to give away some proprietary information on the inner workings of its Windows operating system.
"Some of the people we were consulting asked for extra time and we saw no reason not to give it to them," Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the European Commission, the antitrust regulator for the 25-nation European Union, told journalists.
Companies including IBM, Oracle and Nokia Oyj, which are opposing Microsoft, now have until Friday to reply, Todd said in an e-mailed statement. The original deadline was last Friday.
Microsoft has released a toolkit for Windows XP designed for administrators with little or no IT experience that operate shared computers in public places. The Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit combines software tools with best practice documentation, enabling administrators to restrict system resources with the correct user policies, prevent programs from making unauthorized changes to the computers' hard disks and simplify the end user experience by eliminating unnecessary programs and interface elements.
Microsoft and Toshiba have entered into a wide-ranging agreement that will allow the two companies to share hardware and software technologies. The deal aims to accelerate the delivery to the market of new Microsoft technologies in electronic devices.
Toshiba's HD-DVD technology will be mixed with Microsoft's Windows CE operating system to investigate the feasibility of a player using the embedded OS. Also, Microsoft and Toshiba will look into iHD, a new DVD interactivity format.
South Korea's antitrust commission will make a final ruling next month on allegations that Microsoft unfairly used its dominant position to shut out rivals, the government said Monday.
The nation's Fair Trade Commission has been investigating allegations raised by South Korean Internet portal Daum Communications in September 2001 that Microsoft breached antitrust laws by selling a version of the Windows system that incorporated Microsoft's own instant messaging software.
After failing to break into the mainstream of computing, the Tablet PC might have been written off by many, but it still has at least one strong supporter. Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, said Monday that he still believes in the form-factor and repeated a prediction that, with better hardware and software, it could still dominate traditional laptop PCs.
Gates showed prototype Tablet PCs at the Comdex show in Las Vegas in 2001--a year ahead of their 2002 launch--and at the show said in a statement, "It's a PC that is virtually without limits and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."
According to a recent (Microsoft-funded) study conducted by Wipro Technologies, the cost of updating Microsoft software is significantly less than the cost of updating open-source software (OSS) in real-world environments. That finding means that Microsoft software is ultimately more secure than Linux software because security updates are more easily applied to Windows. "OSS-based systems faced with high-level and critical vulnerabilities are at risk longer than comparable Windows-based systems," Wipro states in its report, while noting another interesting statistic that demonstrates the difference between perception and reality: "Survey respondents consistently overestimated the number of Windows vulnerabilities, while underestimating those for OSS." You don't take this stuff seriously, do you?