Technology soothsayers may have given a gloomy prognosis for Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition, but the Redmond giant will end up as the eventual winner despite the less-than-perfect product introduction.
Earlier this month, the software maker announced plans to ship the Starter Edition--a cheap, localized, stripped-down version of its standard WinXP operating system--in developing Asian markets like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia by October.
In spite of this harsh warning, Microsoft's cut-price Windows will likely prove to be a winning move, simply because the firm has nothing much to lose from this experiment.
Sun Microsystems trimmed its fourth quarter and full-year 2004 results this week, to account for final accounting of asset retirement obligations and its settlement with Microsoft In financial documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, the Santa Clara, California, company said its net income for the quarter ended June 30, 2004 had been revised down by $12 million and $0.01 a share. Consequently, its 2004 annual net loss was increased by $12 million, and $0.01 per share, Sun said.
Microsoft has commissioned a study showing that its .Net development environment is more productive than comparable Java environments, a top company executive said at the VSLive! Orlando conference here.
Microsoft Developer Division Corporate Vice President Soma Somasegar said Microsoft commissioned The Middleware Co. Inc. to study productivity and performance comparisons between Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 and IBM's WebSphere and other tools, and Microsoft fared significantly better.
Microsoft and Polycom have struck a multi-year agreement to link Microsoft's Office Live Communications Server with Polycom's conferencing products, the companies plan to announce Tuesday. Microsoft hopes the connection will spur sales of Live Communications Server, an enterprise instant messaging and "presence" product, while Polycom is keen to sell more desktop video conferencing hardware, representatives from both companies said.
With Live Communications Server, companies can run their own enterprise instant messaging network. The product is capable of determining whether a user is online and available for communication in Office applications and can extend this "presence" information to other applications.
Sun Microsystems and Microsoft next month plan to provide more details on work they are doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said Monday. The announcement will focus on their work regarding interoperability in the Web services and directory services area.
An October announcement means a slight delay for details on the interoperability work. Sun Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy said in late June at the company's JavaOne conference that Sun and Microsoft would detail their initial collaborative work during the U.S. summer, which ends in September.
Microsoft is set to go to trial Tuesday in a patent case that challenges a key element of the software giant's Office software. Arendi Holdings, a small Swiss company, filed the lawsuit in 2002, 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." The case is scheduled to begin a jury trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, with a decision expected in about two weeks.
Internet engineers working on a standard for identifying the source of e-mail messages voted down a proposal by Microsoft to make some of the company's intellectual property a mandatory part of the solution.
On Saturday, a co-chair of the technical working group responsible for developing a standard for authenticating the origin of e-mail messages summarized the results of a vote by the group members. The group--part of the Internet Engineering Task Force and more formerly known as the MTA Authorization Records in DNS, or MARID, working group--decided that Microsoft's insistence on keeping secret a possible patent application on its proposed technology was unacceptable.
It was an especially eventful summer for Microsoft, with the company unveiling new initiatives to take on rivals Apple Computer and Google, announcing plans for an unprecedented payout to shareholders, and cutting a key feature from designs for the next version of Windows.
Not to mention winning a critical appeals court ruling that upheld its U.S. antitrust settlement. And releasing a long-awaited update meant to make Windows more secure.
But to look at Microsoft's stock price over the same time period, it's almost as if nothing happened -- good or bad. To the surprise of some analysts, amid all the tumult, Microsoft shares have stayed within a relatively limited price range, from $26 to $29 a share.
Microsoft plans to expand its pitch to developers with a new middle-of-the-road Visual Studio package.
The software giant is set to announce plans Monday for Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, a package that would be positioned between previously announced high-end and hobbyist versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft's family of products for creating Windows applications.
"One of the key goals for the product line was to make sure we didn't approach developers with a one-tool-fits-all attitude," said John Montgomery, director of Microsoft's developer division. "It turns out there are lots of different kinds of developers, with different needs."
On Monday, Microsoft and UK phone maker Sendo announced that they had reached a settlement in their intellectual property (IP) rights theft lawsuit, with Sendo dropping all charges against the software giant. Though exact terms of the settlement have not been revealed, a Sendo representative said that the company was "extremely pleased with the terms" of the deal.
Sendo had sued Microsoft late 2002, after discovering that Microsoft had given Sendo's design for a Windows Mobile-Powered Smartphone to competitors in Southeast Asia. Sendo had created the first working Smartphone device and was originally going to be the first company to produce one for customers.