Microsoft said late Tuesday that it had resolved problems that had caused a significant outage affecting its MSN Messenger service worldwide. A company representative declined to elaborate on the nature of the problem, or the steps Microsoft took in fixing it. In an earlier statement, the representative said the outage was caused by an "isolated issue that we've located in the data center."
The problem had affected a "significant" number of MSN Messenger users intermittently since Monday afternoon, the representative said.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it is buying Sybari Software, an antivirus and antispam software company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Microsoft intends to use the acquisition to provide its corporate customers with technology to protect themselves against malicious software, according to a company statement. The acquisition is Microsoft's first in the antivirus market since the company purchased technology from GeCAD Software Srl of Bucharest, Romania, in June 2003. It also comes amid expectations among industry insiders that company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will use a keynote speech at next week's RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to announce plans for a consumer antivirus product.
Microsoft is on track to release the first full test version of the next major Windows release by the end of June, a Microsoft executive told CNET News.com on Monday.
The company has said publicly that Beta 1 of Longhorn would arrive by the end of 2005, though internally, the company has been aiming for a release by midyear. The final version of Longhorn is slated for the second half of next year.
"There will be a beta 1 of Longhorn...happening in the first half of this year," John Montgomery, a director in Microsoft's developer division, said during an interview at VSLive, a conference devoted to the company's Visual Studio .Net toolkit. The release will be primarily aimed at developers, Montgomery said.
Microsoft is considering the release of source code for a popular tool used to build Windows programs.
In a blog posting last week, Shawn Burke, a development manager at Microsoft's Windows Forms team, floated the idea of releasing the source code to Windows Forms to its developer customers. Windows Forms is a programming model used with Microsoft's Visual Studio tools to build the user interface portion of Windows desktop applications.
Burke made clear that open sourcing Windows Forms is under consideration, but that no decisions have been made.
Three years after introducing Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework, Microsoft on Monday promoted the benefits of the developer tools and demonstrated some of the updates coming later this year in Visual Studio 2005.
Kicking off the VSLive and Windows Anywhere conferences here on Monday, Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft, also announced two new online information resources for .Net developers: a patterns and practices library and a connected systems business kit.
Microsoft's launch of a new Web search engine last week marked the official beginning of its bid to topple Yahoo! and Google from their positions atop the industry.
But beyond the battle for dominance, Microsoft's search initiative comes with some practical benefits that promise to help the company's business even if its retooled MSN Search service doesn't ultimately emerge as No. 1 in market share.
One of the biggest is advertising revenue. Internet search engines have become large sources of it for Microsoft and other companies, primarily through the keyword-based ads that advertisers pay to place above or alongside standard results.
Processor maker AMD and Microsoft are partnering to move corporate customers over to x64-based 64-bit servers. Microsoft is hosting x64 servers running AMD Opteron processors at its worldwide Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) so customers can test applications and services on the new platform. The x64 platform was derived from AMD's AMD-64 work, which basically added 64-bit capabilities to the aging x86 processor line. Now expected to be the dominant PC platform of the future, thanks in part to an endorsement from Intel, which is adding x64 capabilities to its own processors, x64 is becoming an increasingly interesting alternative for customers who want higher amounts of memory and other resources. I've been running an x64 desktop machine since September, and I'll never go back. Have no doubt; x64 is the platform of the future.
Microsoft will share information about security problems with government agencies as part of its efforts to slow the spread of open source software.
Under the Security Cooperation Program, Microsoft will advise participating government agencies on network security issues in an effort to try to anticipate or mitigate security lapses, said Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president of Microsoft's worldwide public-sector unit.
Trend Micro is warning of a new variant of the Bropia worm that uses MSN Messenger to spread. The Bropia.F worm is packaged with a second, more damaging worm that tries to exploit poorly patched computers, the antivirus company said on Thursday.
The latest variant of the Bropia worm was discovered on Wednesday evening, Trend Micro said. It infects systems belonging to users of MSN Messenger by sending itself as a picture of a roast chicken with tan lines to all available or online contacts. It also releases a second more dangerous worm, called Agabot.ajc, on the infected computer.
In an effort to boost sales of Windows, Microsoft has its sights set on its nearest competitor. But it's not Linux. And sorry, Apple Computer fans, it's not the Mac. The biggest rival to Windows sales is Windows itself--or rather pirated copies of the OS. And Microsoft is starting to put its foot down.
Analysts agree that cracking down on unlicensed copies of Windows is one of only a few ways Microsoft can grow the business, which is a key generator of profits. But they also point to significant risks involved in taking a harder line.