Microsoft plans to continue to unearth more evidence to help it combat Linux in the coming fiscal year. The Redmond software vendor plans to step up its "Get the Facts" anti-open-source campaign in the coming year by adding more evidence, in the form of customer case studies and analyst reports, to its arsenal.
That's what Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's group vice president of worldwide sales, marketing and services, told the approximately 300 press and analysts attending Microsoft's annual financial analyst meeting here on Thursday.
The first beta test version of Microsoft's next major Windows client release, code-named Longhorn, probably won't be available until the second half of next year, which would represent another delay for the much-anticipated beta.
Microsoft had scheduled the beta for 2004, but earlier this year said its release would slip into early 2005. The company is adjusting timing for the test version again because of all the work it had to do, and still is doing, on security, especially Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP, people familiar with Microsoft's product plans said Thursday.
"I don't think you will see the beta in the first half," one of the sources said. "SP2 has been a very big deal."
Some Microsoft Money users continued to vent their frustrations Thursday over a server glitch that has prevented them from accessing their online personal finance files for nearly four days.
Microsoft confirmed that some users of its Money software have been locked out of their files since Monday afternoon. Money's servers are not recognizing ID information from a group of consumers, said Goca Micic, group marketing manager for Microsoft's home retail division. "Other consumers coming into Money accounts haven't experienced the problem and will not at this point."
Microsoft revealed the progress it has made in building search technology on Thursday when it demonstrated a tool that can search both the Internet and a PC's hard drive.
MSN Chief Yusuf Mehdi showed a prototype of the search software, still under development, to an audience at its annual Microsoft Financial Analysts Meeting here. The technology is designed to quickly look through a hard drive, finding all the matches for a word from within documents, e-mails and even e-mail attachments. The version Mehdi presented also returned Web results on the right side of the page.
Aiming to foil the advent of Linux and attack software piracy in emerging markets, Microsoft plans to expand its cheap Windows XP Starter Edition offer to more countries, a company executive said Thursday.
Windows XP Starter Edition is a version of the operating system designed for a specific market that is easy to use, support and sell, Will Poole, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Client group said in a presentation at the company's annual financial analyst meeting here.
PC users could see big breakthroughs in the years ahead as what is in the Microsoft Corp. pipeline is more exciting than anything the software giant has ever cooked up, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said at the annual financial analysts day here on Thursday.
In a talk about innovation and how it fits into the software industry, Gates said that being able to redistribute $30 billion indicated just how far the software business model has come.
Pointing to the effect that new hardware has had on enabling new scenarios and advances in software, Gates highlighted the ability for users to be able to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same piece of hardware.
While Microsoft remains committed to security and will raise the protection bar with its release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) next month, there is no single silver bullet to the problem, Will Poole, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows client division, said at the annual analyst day here Thursday.
Security issues have been at the forefront of Microsoft's business over the past year as this has come to a head, Poole said, adding that Microsoft is committed to building trust through innovation and is doing everything it can to improve the quality of the software and the way it responds to attacks.
For the second year in a row, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates used the company's Financial Analyst Meeting to emphasize how important modeling is to the company's development strategy.
"Modeling is something you're going to hear more and more from us about," Gates told an audience of financial analysts and media at the company's Redmond, Wash., campus Thursday.
"It's modeling that's going to greatly simplify applications customization," he said. "The place we're using it mostly today is to describe how two pieces of software relate to each other."
Microsoft hopes to replace IBM as the top patent filer in the United States, according to Microsoft founder and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates. At the annual Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting Thursday in Redmond, Wash., Gates said the software giant plans to step up its patent efforts as part of a plan to provide new software innovations to achieve revenue growth.
Microsoft will file for more than 3,000 patents in fiscal year 2005, which began July 1, Gates said. This is a "fairly dramatic increase" over its fiscal year 2004 patent activity, in which slightly more than 2,000 patents were filed, he said.
Microsoft has released an upgrade to its Web Services Enhancements technology for .Net developers. The Redmond, Wash., company this week announced Web Services Enhancements 2.0 Service Pack 1 (WSE 2.0 SP1) for Microsoft .Net. The technology is an add-on to the company's Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework that enables developers to build secure Web services, the company said.
Microsoft officials said WSE 2.0 SP1 enables developers to more readily apply security policies to Web services. The technology enables developers to encrypt Web services using Kerberos tickets, X.509 certificates, username/password credentials, and other custom binary and XML-based security tokens, the company said.