The British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decision issued Wednesday found that a Microsoft advertisement placed in a British specialist magazine claiming that open-source Linux was far more expensive to run than Windows was misleading. ASA called on Microsoft to amend the ad.
Tracey Pretorius, the manager for Microsoft UK, said the company had been working with the ASA to "understand and address their concerns about the advertisement in question.
A source close to Microsoft and familiar with the matter said Wednesday that Microsoft had worked with the ASA in advance and submitted all ads for general approval before they were run, as was its standard policy on advertising.
With a long-awaited security update to Windows XP now complete, Microsoft is preparing a holiday season push for the 3-year-old operating system--and is set to revisit ambitious plans for the next major revision, News.com has learned.
That revision, code-named Longhorn, one of the most difficult and complicated in the company's history, has fallen further behind this year, as Microsoft shifted developers from the project and onto Windows XP Service Pack 2, which took longer than expected. Now the company faces the task of getting Longhorn under control and making XP seem fresh during a longer-than-usual wait between operating system updates.
For XP users who also are running Internet Information Services to host their own Web sites, Microsoft is offering support for IIS version 5.1 as part of the SP2 bits. The company also is including an updated version of Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), a collection of technologies that provide access to information across heterogeneous data sources.
Windows XP SP2 includes an upgrade to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 that will install on PCs running the current version of Media Center Edition. The updated 2004 bits provide improved TV picture quality, an enhanced music library, better photo handling and access to music and video-on-demand, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft is expanding a plan to draw mainframe customers to Windows for high-end applications. Under a program with the internal code name Mission Critical Microsoft, the company is trying to extend its current data center support and sales efforts to a wider range of customers, according to company representative. Microsoft discussed the plan this week at an IBM mainframe user conference in New York.
Microsoft is planning a new branding campaign similar to "Intel Inside" for its Windows Media audio and video technology, hoping to highlight the near-ubiquity of its multimedia technology, sources familiar with the plans say.
The "Plays for sure" campaign will include a logo on devices that support Microsoft's Windows Media and will be advertised by download services that distribute files in that format, sources said. Although not specifically using the Windows Media brand name, the campaign is aimed at assuring consumers that all services and devices carrying the logo will be compatible with each other.
Microsoft on Wednesday said it has finished work on Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, a major update to its MOM 2000 performance management software. Along with MOM 2005, Microsoft also announced MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition, previously called MOM 2005 Express. This new addition to the Microsoft management product line-up was announced in March and is pitched as a less expensive product for organizations with between four and 10 servers, requiring only simple monitoring of Microsoft Windows Server environments.
Microsoft continues to pump up the noise around its small-business channel efforts. Wednesday it plans to launch a new online small business community. Making use of SharePoint for shared workspaces, the site will allow registered VARs or solution providers to tap into shared documents, sales tools and other partner resources as well as post questions and proposals, according to a post to the "E-bitz" Small Business Server Blog.
Microsoft has excused itself from participating in an international standards body because of concerns over control of intellectual property the company contributed to the group.
Comprised of governmental and industry organizations, the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business was created in 1996 to develop technology standards that facilitate trade among different economies worldwide.
Microsoft is giving administrators a peek at its new Sender ID license agreement, which is an update to the company's Caller ID for E-Mail technology proposed in February. The license is an update to an e-mail authentication specification designed to reduce the number of spoofed e-mails used by many spammers today.
Currently, the technology is under discussion at the MTA Authorization Records in DNS (MARID) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a possible Internet standard. According to the group's charter, the specification is scheduled to be submitted as a proposed standard by the end of the month.
Microsoft today is releasing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) to XP Professional Edition users as expected, but the company made the unexpected announcement that it was also shipping the massive update to all XP users via Windows Update on Wednesday as well. Additionally, XP users are now able to order the Windows XP SP2 CD-ROM, free of charge. This means that virtually all 300 million XP users will now have access to the long-awaited security update.