Microsoft increased its commercial paper investment by eightfold and almost tripled its U.S. government and agency debt holdings as it prepares to pay a $32 billion one-time dividend.
Microsoft also almost tripled its money-market investments, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that disclosed the company's holdings as of June 30. Money-market instruments are among the lowest risk and lowest-return investments, paying a two-decade low 0.63 percent in 2003.
Sun Microsystems has found one more way to cozy up to users of Microsoft products without actually shipping the Windows operating system on its computers. For the next three months, Sun will offer Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs) a 35 percent discount on its line of Opteron servers and workstations, the company announced Wednesday. The promotion is designed to give Microsoft professionals the "unique opportunity" to sell and support Windows on Sun's PC systems, Sun said in a statement.
IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Computer Associates have jumped aboard in support of the WS-Eventing specification for subscribing to Web services-based events, joining original developers Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Tibco Software.
The specification is intended to define a baseline set of operations that allow Web services to provide asynchronous notifications to interested parties. For example, an event notification could pertain to shipping of an order or e-mail arriving. Microsoft officials cited desires for interoperability between different specifications as reasons why rivals such as Sun and IBM are climbing aboard.
Microsoft's sweeping changes to its next major Windows release are drawing little surprise from enterprise IT departments, many of whom were not counting on the most revolutionary changes promised in Longhorn.
Late last week, Microsoft announced that it was dropping a centerpiece of Longhorn called WinFS (Windows File System) in order to meet its schedule for releasing the desktop version in 2006 and the server version in 2007.
WinFS had been heralded as Microsoft's next-generation storage subsystem for Windows that would improve the storage and retrieval of files.
SeattlePI
An attorney for a software company suing Microsoft Corp. for alleged anti-competitive behavior deposed Chairman Bill Gates last week and plans to ask a judge to make the testimony public. Burst alleges that Microsoft stole its multimedia software after breaking off talks with Burst on a joint project.
Burst, based in Santa Rosa, Calif., sued Microsoft in June 2002 alleging that Microsoft developed its own multimedia software for moving audio and video more quickly over the Internet after discussing the technology for months with Burst.
Backers of the Blu-ray DVD format are adopting Microsoft's video compression technology, giving the software giant a secure foothold in each of the two major camps battling to establish a successor to DVDs.
The move will lead to licensing fees given to companies, like Microsoft, that own intellectual property used by these codecs. The decision also appears to show that Microsoft was wise to buck its usual strategy and turn its VC-9 technology over to an open-standards body such as SMPTE. Doherty said it was "important" to the Blu-ray backers that Microsoft's codec became an open-standards technology.
Microsoft plans to expand its e-commerce efforts and will offer downloads of its media software through more than 200 retailers. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker on Tuesday announced details of a new relationship with e-commerce services provider Digital River. Under the arrangement Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition package will be made available for download at scores of Web sites. The media software will be marketed in a handful of top U.S. retail chains, including BestBuy, CompUSA, OfficeMax and Staples.
Microsoft is continuing to flesh out the services it is offering via its SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology) "smart" watches. On Monday, Microsoft released a minor update to its MSN Direct service that delivers personalized content to watches over FM-radio frequencies. The new services add NFL and college football to the list of sports users can track in the sports channel. At the same time, Microsoft added a service allowing users to select up to two watch faces from a regularly changing library.
Oracle on Tuesday delivered its first-ever monthly rollup of security patches, addressing more than 30 vulnerabilities discovered by Next Generation Security Software Ltd. between January and February, and also tackling more than 20 vulnerabilities that eWEEK.com has learned were recently discovered by Application Security Inc.
Oracle issued notice of the patches late in the day, narrowly making its promised deadline of delivering the first rollup Aug. 31 after weeks of saying little about the security flaws.
InternetNews
Unfazed by distribution hiccups and noisy security skeptics, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with the international rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). One month after English language versions of the service pack shipped to manufacturers, the software giant released SP2 to manufacturing in German, Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese.
"[We are] on track to localize the software into 25 different languages within two months of RTM," a Microsoft spokesman told internetnews.com.