On Wednesday, Microsoft finally lifted the veil of secrecy about its next generation Xbox video game console (codenamed Xenon), providing concrete information about the device for the first time. The Xbox 2 disclosures were made at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), held in San Francisco.
According to Microsoft corporate vice president J. Allard, Xbox 2 will move video gaming from the "3D Era" to the "HD Era," providing game fans with the lush, high resolution video quality that movie and TV lovers have enjoyed for some time. "In the HD Era the platform is bigger than the processor," he said during a GDC keynote address. "New technology and emerging consumer forces will come together to enable the rock stars of game development to shake up the old establishment and redefine entertainment as we know it."
The next version of Microsoft's MSN Messenger will offer improved video chat capabilities developed by Microsoft and Logitech, the companies said Wednesday.
In MSN Messenger 7.0, due out in the coming months, users will be able to start a video chat with synchronized audio with a single mouse click, Microsoft and Logitech announced at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.
Microsoft and Logitech have collaborated on video chat in MSN Messenger for the past two years, and the companies have extended that relationship for MSN Messenger 7.0, they said.
The Unix and Linux vendors have done it. Now Microsoft is giving certified software stacks a whirl, starting with its Axapta ERP product.
Microsoft's strategy for bringing more independent software vendors (ISVs) into the fold continued to evolve this week, with the Redmond software vendor's unveiling of a new initiative called "Industry Builder."
Although Microsoft isn't characterizing the program as a way to provide customers with integrated, certified and supported software stacks, that is, in effect, what the end the program - announced here at the company's annual Convergence conference for Microsoft Business Solutions customers - will yield.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ), which pursued an antitrust against Microsoft for several years, has snubbed the software giant and signed a significant software deal with its rival WordPerfect. Under terms of the deal, the DOJ will purchase 50,000 licenses of WordPerfect Office 12, the latest version of the company's office productivity suite. The deal is worth $13.2 million over five years.
Privately held Corel does not disclose sales figures, but the $13.2 million deal likely represents more to the company than just the dollar figure. By comparison, Microsoft made over $2.8 billion from its Microsoft Office products in just the final quarter of 2004.
After investing significantly in technology for radio frequency identification devices, Microsoft is readying its first major product, a software package designed to help companies manage the product-tagging technology.
Microsoft plans early next year to release the RFID Services Platform, a "middleware" product that connects the hardware that monitors RFID signals with the business software that can make sense of the information. The product is designed for businesses that want to incorporate RFID into their own systems as well as for other software companies that want to build a product based on Microsoft's technology.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates trumpeted Office's role in integrating communications as he unveiled further plans for the company's "Istanbul" client and other real-time communications products during a launch event here on Tuesday.
Microsoft brought its combined instant-messaging and telephony client under the Office umbrella, renaming it Office Communicator 2005 and announcing plans to release it to manufacturing in the next 90 days.
On the server end, Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005 also is undergoing a revamp, Gates said. Microsoft in April plans to make a service pack available to the enterprise IM and presence server, which will support the new client and provide management features for federation and for controlling IM spam.
The Microsoft IT Department this month posted a public account of its efforts in deploying Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 -- a sure sign the release of the service pack is imminent.
Microsoft IT, which defines one of its primary functions as being "Microsoft's first customer," regularly releases a report on its rollout experience near or just before the Release to Manufacturing of a major Microsoft product or update.
Windows Server 2003 SP1 is a major service pack for the server operating system, bringing new security enhancements such as the Security Configuration Wizard and Windows Firewall on top of the usual service pack bug fixes. Microsoft has said SP1 will be available in the first half of 2005, and the service pack is in Release Candidate 2 testing.
Microsoft released its third Community Technical Preview for SQL Server 2005 this month with a new ad hoc reporting tool and 64-bit support for more components of Microsoft's flagship database.
As the schedule for the Beta 3 version of SQL Server 2005 stretched further out from the summer 2004 Beta 2 version, Microsoft began releasing Community Technical Previews. One came out in October and another shipped in December. They are available on MSDN and to SQL Server beta testers. Microsoft must deliver the Beta 3 version of SQL Server 2005 this month to meet the current schedule, which calls for the test version in the first quarter of this year.
New worms spreading through MSN Messenger -- and its bundled-with-Windows Windows Messenger version -- via links to a malicious site are infecting users and leaving their PCs open to hacker hijack, security vendors reported Monday.
The new worms, tagged as Kelvir.a and Kelvir.b, appeared over the weekend and on Monday, respectively, anti-virus vendors said. Both use the same mechanism to attract users and infect Windows-based PCs: they include a link in the instant message. That link, in turn, downloads a malicious file -- the actual worm, a variant of the long-running Spybot -- which opens a backdoor to the compromised machine.
With much of the small-and-midsize-business market still unpenetrated, Microsoft is intensifying development efforts to provide that hard-to-reach space with more-viable products.
At its Business Solutions Convergence conference in San Diego this week, the Redmond, Wash., company is expected to reveal more details about Project Green, its plan to unite the business application suites acquired from Great Plains, Navision, Axapta and Solomon into a single code base, which isn't expected until 2008.