As part of its ongoing efforts to woo public sector customers, Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp. has begun giving governments tools for collaborating and sharing technology information with other organizations so that they can learn from each other's experiences and cut development costs.
Under a program titled the Solutions Sharing Network, Microsoft is helping provide public sector clients with a community-based portal for sharing best practices, application source codes, and other development information, it said Tuesday.
Microsoft has spent more than $3 billion settling antitrust litigation over the past 18 months, and its total bill for settling claims could exceed $4.5 billion.
As it strives to dispose of its remaining antitrust litigation in the United States and reach a final settlement with the European Commission, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant on Monday announced a $536 million antitrust settlement with rival Novell plus a wide-ranging agreement to cooperate with the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), an industry trade association that has long opposed Microsoft.
Microsoft is following through on plans to reach out to IBM Lotus Domino developers in an effort to increase those developers' adoption of Microsoft technology.
Last month, Domino developers traveled to Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., for a workshop organized by Gary Devendorf, a former Lotus application development guru and now technology evangelist in Microsoft's server group, and attended by several other Microsoft executives including David Thompson, corporate vice president of the Exchange Server Product Group at Microsoft.
Looking to drive corporate adoption of its high-performance computing version of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft on Monday introduced an SDK (software development kit) for developers alongside a name change for the product.
Just months after confirming plans to join the supercomputing game, Redmond will use the spotlight of this week's SC2004 supercomputing show in Pittsburgh to demonstrate the SDK and change the name from Windows Server 2003 HPC Edition to Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition.
The SDK, which provides tools and APIs for developers to build integrated, high-performance computing applications, will be released to select partners later this month.
Comcast said on Monday that it will make Microsoft set-top box software available to more than half a million customers in the Seattle area.
The announcement follows up on a pledge earlier this year by the two companies to broadly deploy the software maker's Microsoft TV Foundation Edition software. Comcast has taken a license to use Microsoft's software in 5 million homes.
"Today marks an important milestone in the overall partnership between Microsoft and Comcast," said Moshe Lichtman, a corporate vice president in the Microsoft TV unit. "It's also the first large-scale deployment of our software in the U.S. market."
Microsoft on Monday announced antitrust settlements with Novell and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, ending years of legal wrangling. Microsoft will pay Novell $536 million under the agreement, in which Novell will resolve all antitrust claims relating to Novell's NetWare product, and any other products it owns. The agreement came out of private mediation between the two companies, according to a joint news release.
Novell will end its antitrust claims under U.S. and all other national and state laws concerning its products. Novell will also withdraw from participation in the European Commissions case with Microsoft and will no longer participate as an intervener on behalf of the European Commission in Microsofts appeal of the commissions March 24 ruling.
After stepping up its own patent push, Microsoft is now trying to get its hands on other companies' intellectual property. Doing so will give the company more freedom to develop software in new areas and help the company as it seeks to indemnify its customers against any claims of patent infringement.
Microsoft has roughly 100 licensing deals in the works, with about 15 to 20 being broad cross-licensing pacts with other large companies, Kaefer said, adding that it can take from one to two years to reach an accord.
Millions of video-game enthusiasts will soon see if Master Chief can successfully defend Earth from an invasion of Covenant forces. The bigger question for Microsoft: Can he win the critical holiday battle against Sony and Nintendo?
Master Chief is the cybernetic star of "Halo 2," the follow-up to the best-selling video game for Microsoft's Xbox game console. Developed by the company's internal Bungie Studios, "Halo 2" is at the center of a broader effort by Microsoft to fuel continued interest in the Xbox three years after the console's launch.
According to a study the British security firm mi2g, Linux is the world's "most breached" OS and is exploited more frequently than Windows. The company recently analyzed more than 235,000 successful attacks against computers that were permanently connected to the Internet during the past year and concluded that Linux was responsible for most of the successful exploits.
"For how long can the truth remain hidden, that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day?" DK Matai, mi2g's executive chairman, said in a statement. "Busy professionals ... don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavors of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well-chronicled instances."
Starting Monday, film buffs can just look at their wristwatch to get movie listings in the neighborhood theater. Microsoft, which has been pushing smart watches as a means of content delivery, announced on Friday that it was adding film showings channel to its MSN Direct data service. Subscribers can track up to 10 theaters in their local area and view movie listings and show times directly on their watches. CinemaSource, a division of Hollywood Media, will provide the movie data.