Microsoft's chief executive believes it's naive to suggest the software giant can eliminate all security vulnerabilities in its various products even though engineers are trying hard to do so. Hackers get smarter, too, Steve Ballmer told several thousand information-technology workers at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO. But Ballmer said engineers were making progress, such as adding security enhancements to Windows Server 2003 when its next big update, Service Pack 1, comes out.
Microsoft's operating systems run on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers. Even if Microsoft can make its products completely invulnerable, customers wouldn't upgrade all their systems, Ballmer said.
The Windows Future Storage (WinFS) technology is making good progress and will be included in a "Longhorn wave" of products, although it's still not going to be ready for the Windows Longhorn client release in 2006, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo 2004.
In a wide-ranging discussion with Gartner analysts Darryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman, Ballmer also touched on competition with Linux, 64-bit prospects and software piracy.
Citing continued strength in the PC and server markets, Microsoft on Thursday reported earnings that beat Wall Street expectations and a 12 percent increase in revenue for the first quarter of its 2005 fiscal year. The world's largest software vendor reported net income of $2.9 billion on revenue of $9.19 billion for the three-month period ended Sept. 30. That compares to net income of $2.61 billion and revenue of $8.22 billion in the year-earlier period, the company said in a statement.
Microsoft wants your next car or SUV to run Windows.
It's no joke. The world's largest software company is revving up to position itself as the largest supplier of software to car manufacturers, with a custom version of Windows CE controlling everything from in-vehicle entertainment to satellite navigation.
"We're providing the end-to-end telematic system," says Peter Wengert, an electrical engineer who is now a marketing manager for Microsoft's Automotive Business Unit. Telematics is the auto industry's term for networked cars.
It was an ambitious, self-imposed goal -- distribute 100 million copies of Windows XP Service Pack 2 within two months of the critical security update's release. On Wednesday, Microsoft declared success.
"In just two months, more than 106 million copies of Windows XP SP2 have been distributed around the world," a company spokesman said in an e-mail to reporters. "Approximately 90 million were downloaded via Automatic Update, Windows Update and the Download Center. Another 16 million were distributed via CDs, either ordered from Microsoft or distributed by Microsoft via various venues."
Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokeswoman said. Microsoft repositioning of Passport comes as careers Web site Monster.com said it was dropping support of the authentication service. Monster was one of Microsoft's banner Passport users.
Once a key part of its hosted services strategy, Microsoft has been quiet about Passport in the past few years and has not done any significant development work on the system. Instead, the company has been quietly scaling back several of Passport's components.
Microsoft officials confirmed the existence of two vulnerabilities within Internet Explorer 6.0 that affect all versions of Windows, including Windows XP Service Pack 2 users. It's a continuation of the "drag-and-drop" flaw security officials at Microsoft have spent more than two months fixing.
The first vulnerability is caused by insufficient validation of drag-and-drop events from the "Internet Zone" to the "Local Computer" zone, the report states. Images or files downloaded by a user can be embedded with HTML code containing arbitrary scripts and bypass the security measures in place.
What's one of Steve Ballmer's biggest headaches? It's not Linux or security breaches. It's piracy, the Microsoft CEO said Wednesday.
"The biggest problem we have right now is that people who should be paying for software aren't," Ballmer told an audience of technology executives at an industry conference here sponsored by market researcher Gartner.
One way to stem piracy is to offer consumers in emerging countries a low-cost PC, Ballmer said. "There has to be...a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries. We have to engineer (PCs) to be lighter and cheaper," he said.
Dell, the world's largest computer maker, actually gained market share on rival Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the most recent quarter, according to both Gartner and IDC. Shipments of Dell PCs rose over 20 percent, year-over-year, in the most current quarter. The company now owns 18.2 percent of the global PC market, up from 16.9 percent in the same quarter a year ago.
"Dell completely blew its competitors away again," IDC analyst Roger Kay said. HP retained the number two spot, with 16.2 percent of the market, down from 16.6 percent a year earlier. IBM was number three, followed by Fujitsu and then Toshiba.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) said Tuesday Microsoft is "generally moving in the right direction" in its compliance efforts with the landmark 2002 antitrust settlement between the company and the DoJ.
Earlier this month, the DoJ complained in a required status report that Microsoft wanted to distribute documentation for licensees in a rights-protected file format, derivative of HTML, that can only be used with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
"I think we have resolved the distribution issue. It's one more thing we can check off the list," DoJ attorney Renata Hesse told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was holding a quarterly compliance status court session.