Microsoft has chosen India as the fifth destination for a low-cost version of Windows. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant on Wednesday announced a yearlong pilot program to start shipping Windows XP Starter Edition to India in early 2005. Earlier this week, the company made a similar move in Russia, while plans for Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia were confirmed in August, as part of the software maker's plan to gain market share in developing nations.
Those magnets passed out by neighborhood pizza joints could someday provide much more than mere logos and phone numbers. The latest remake of a concept home on Microsoft's Redmond campus includes a magnetic bulletin board that recognizes radio frequency tags layered into coupons and other promotional objects. After sensing a magnet from a particular pizza shop, for example, the bulletin board taps into the Internet to retrieve and display that shop's current specials.
Earlier than scheduled, Microsoft has gone public with its announcement of its third open-source code contribution to SourceForge. Microsoft's mystery contribution? FlexWiki. Late Monday evening, SourceForge posted information on Microsoft's FlexWiki code to its software repository. FlexWiki is an experimental collaboration tool based on WikiWiki, which is a tool for collaborating on common Web pages.
According to the FlexWiki Web site, FlexWiki was originally named SharpWiki, and was created by David Ornstein. Ornstein is currently a lead program manager with Microsoft's digital documents group, which is part of the Windows team.
Microsoft launched a matchmaking service for partners that is designed to boost customer use of the free training vouchers that come with Software Assurance.
On Monday, the software giant officially rolled out the program in the United States with three top resellers and more than 60 Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions, said Ginelle Cousins, lead marketing manager for MCPLS, formerly known as Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers.
About a year after releasing Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft rolled out a free, automated best practice tool to help IT get the most out of the e-mail server and its two predecessors -- Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5. We've developed a tool that basically gives them automated guidance. It's like a Microsoft engineer in a box," says Warren Ashton, group product manager for the Exchange Server Business Group.
Hoping to throw some tacks in the road to slow Linux momentum, Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) during the next year will redouble its efforts to woo more corporate users migrating from Unix to the open source OS. Despite achieving some success convincing Unix users to migrate to Windows platforms, Microsoft hopes to lure significantly more through a concerted effort to highlight the technical and cost benefits of doing so.
Microsoft prepared to strip Media Player in Europe
InternetNews
Microsoft reportedly plans to push for a negotiated settlement of its antitrust dispute with the European Union (EU), even if it means deleting the Windows Media Player (WMP) from its operating system.
According to weekend media reports out of Brussels, where Microsoft's lead attorney Brad Smith met with reporters, the software giant is willing to stop bundling the media player with its Windows operating system if it can't persuade the court to annul the EU regulators' decision and to suspend or substantially reduce the record fine imposed.
Microsoft will release a low-price version of Windows in Russia by the end of the year, an effort to wean consumers in that country off pirated software and Linux.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant will also announce later in the week that it will bring a version of Windows XP Starter Edition, a relatively inexpensive and slimmed down version of Windows, to a fourth, as-yet-unidentified, Asian country, bringing the total number of countries in the program to five.
Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft on Monday will announce that it is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that currently allows non-paying customers to access their email from Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning), an extension to the HTTP protocol on which the Web is based.
Free Hotmail users who have already enabled Outlook or Outlook Express access to Hotmail won't be shut off immediately. Instead, Microsoft will phase them out over several months, and give them plenty of warning that the change is coming.
Some large enterprises have taken the Linux challenge only to switch back to Windows, dissatisfied with the open-source alternative. Problems with application incompatibilities, poor performance, escalating support costs and an immature Linux ecosystem lead the list of complaints executives at two companies that have completed the switch from Linux back to Windows cited recently.
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."