A jury ruled in Microsoft's favor late on Wednesday, deciding that a feature in recent versions of Office doesn't infringe on a patent held by another software maker.
In 2002, small Norwegian company Arendi Holdings filed a lawsuit charging Microsoft with violating its U.S. Patent 6,323,853 for a "method, system and computer readable medium for addressing handling from a computer program."
Jurors agreed with the first part of Microsoft's defense, which argued that the technology covered by the Arendi patent is fundamentally different from Smart Tags. The jury upheld the validity of the patent, however, rejecting Microsoft's argument that similar technology existed before the patent application was filed.
This week, Microsoft asked the European Court of First Instance to suspend its European Union (EU) antitrust sanctions while the company conducts its appeal. Citing the "historic" nature of the EU sanctions, which Microsoft says would require the company to share "secret technology" with its competitors, Microsoft argued that complying with the sanctions now will needlessly harm the company if it eventually wins or settles the EU case.
"This is the first time in history that a company has been ordered to draw up a description of secret technology and deliver it to its competitors," a Microsoft lawyer said during a hearing in Luxemborg before the EU court.
The combination of its size, shape, and an "HDD & DVD Recording" label along the center of the machine means it could be mistaken for a digital video recorder. It's only when you start to use it--or look a little more closely and notice the discrete "personal computer" label on the front panel--that its real identity is given away.
The PC-TX26GS is a Windows XP-based personal computer with all of the standard software and a series of applications aimed at consumer electronics-type applications.
Despite all appearances, Microsoft insists it hasn't lost interest in Web browsers. It has been years since Microsoft declared victory over browser pioneer Netscape Communications, and a long time since it last released a full upgrade to Internet Explorer (IE). Now critics say the company is fulfilling old predictions that it would embrace the browser and extend its capabilities, only to extinguish it. Redmond rejects that notion, saying instead that the long wait for an IE update is an indication of the work it's putting into the next incarnation of the browser.
Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. But about 80 percent of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows, industry research firm Gartner estimates.
The high price of Windows may be driving vendors in countries like China and Russia to ship Linux on as many as 40 percent of their PCs, but many of these systems will not ultimately run the free operating system, Gartner says in a recent report.
In fact, this high percentage of Linux sales is being driven by the availability of cheap pirated copies of Windows rather than a desire to run Linux.
Microsoft announced several new efforts this week to make it easier to connect digital cameras to PCs. The software giant announced at the Photokina trade show in Germany that it will extend Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), technology it introduced earlier this year for connecting portable media devices with Windows PCs, to include cameras and other digital imaging devices.
MTP is a standard that Microsoft will publish freely for makers of cameras, media devices and other gadgets to incorporate into the "firmware" that runs their devices, said Dave McLauchlan, Microsoft's program manager for Windows Portable Devices. It is based on Photo Transfer Protocol, a standard developed by firmware specialist FotoNation and already supported by many camera makers.
They are on opposite sides of Lake Washington, and sometimes on opposite sides of the technology world, but two Seattle-area tech giants have found common ground in a fight against deceptive and fraudulent e-mail.
A joint lawsuit announced yesterday by Amazon.com and Microsoft is the first legal case to result from a spam-fighting collaboration between the companies that began about a year ago. The suit targets a Canadian firm alleged to have used Microsoft's Hotmail service to send misleading commercial e-mails purporting to come from Amazon.com.
Just days after product's official release, customers who placed their transactions to purchase copies of Microsoft's Money 2005 financial management software are alleging that they were short changed.
Microsoft support newsgroups are rife with displays of cognitive dissonance and customer dissatisfaction over what are alleged to be serious quality control issues - primarily concerning online bill paying features.
Microsoft is flooding the BI market yet again. This time around, the company is announcing new SQL Server Report Packs for Exchange and Business Solutions CRM; Report Builder, a tool that opens up simple report creation to the masses; and a rechristened version of DTS (Data Transformation Services) that will reach into nonpersistent data stores such as those found in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds or Web services.
Microsoft is ready to ask a judge on Thursday to suspend penalties imposed on it for violating antitrust law by using the monopoly of its Windows operating system to hurt competitors. The hearing was set to begin at 9:30 a.m. Court of First Instance President Bo Vesterdorf will hear two or three days of arguments before deciding whether to suspend the remedies. They would remain on hold until the case is completed years from now.