Microsoft has cancelled plans to hold a face-to-face hearing with European antitrust authorities and rivals scheduled for the first week of June, claiming it wouldn't get a fair audience because senior E.U. officials will be absent.
"We believe that holding the hearing at a time when key officials are out of the country would deny Microsoft our effective right to be heard and hence deny our 'rights of defense' under European law," said Dave Heiner, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel.
Although Microsoft quietly delivered Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to TechNet and MSDN subscribers last week, the company has still has not made the upgrade available to other users.Three weeks ago, Microsoft announced it had wrapped up work on Vista SP2, and had slapped a "release to manufacturing" label on the code.
At the time, although a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that Vista SP2 had been handed to computer makers -- who would presumably install it on new PCs sold between now and when Windows 7 ships -- she had no idea when TechNet and MSDN subscribers would be given the upgrade.According to the TechNet download site, Microsoft posted Vista SP2 disk images for both the 32- and 64-bit versions last Friday, May 14.
Microsoft will unveil pricing for Windows 7 in a few weeks, a Web site that has accurately predicted past company moves said today.
TechARP.com, a Malaysian Web site that correctly named the ship date of Internet Explorer 8 earlier this year and leaked details of an upcoming free Windows 7 upgrade program for users who buy Vista PCs after July 1, said that Microsoft will publicly announce prices for Windows 7 in mid-June.
Although Microsoft has detailed the Windows 7 versions it will ship later this year, it has not set prices or a launch date for Vista's successor.
If someone sells you a defective piece of software, what rights do you have? If the retailer doesn't offer a return policy, as you may very well know -- especially if you ever read the End-User License Agreement, wherever it might be located -- your ability to hold the manufacturer liable may be very limited, if not non-existent.
Since the 1990s, Microsoft has been an active opponent of changes to laws and regulations that allow the sale of software to be treated as an exchange of services rather than a sale of goods -- changes that one software development lawyer in 1997 warned would "have a far more damaging effect on software publishing competition and on the quality of software products than anything being done solely by Microsoft today."
Users of Windows Media Center just got a big boost in the variety of content available through their preferred media manager, as Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users who are also Netflix unlimited members have access to over 12,000 movies and TV shows via WMC, effective immediately (give or take a couple of days).
The arrangement dramatically ups the appeal of WMC, especially for those users who don't feel the need to throw a TV tuner into their PC -- or, for that matter, to sign up for Netflix's Instantly To Your TV service.
Intel has released a beta of Moblin 2.0, its Linux operating system distribution designed and tuned specifically for the Atom processor. This update adds a new interface, the result of an acquisition, and specific Atom tuning.
The release comes on the heels of news Intel plans to release new Atom processors later this year. Not much has been discussed about the next version of Atom, developed under the codename "Pine View," but Intel will disclose more information at next month's giant Computex computer trade show in Taiwan. The current line already has received kudos for its lower power and compact design.
Microsoft is planning to take the wraps off its long-awaited search engine upgrade, codenamed "Kumo," next week at an industry conference in Southern California, according to various unconfirmed reports.
The development of Microsoft's new search engine has been a loosely-kept secret, from the early reports that Microsoft had purchased the Kumo.com domain name to the leak that the software giant was putting the project through internal testing in March.
Now, the buzz is that Kumo will meet the world at the D: All Things Digital conference next week.
Microsoft is now letting anyone download My Phone, a mobile data backup program for Windows Mobile devices, which was released in February as an invitation-only beta.
My Phone can be installed on most Windows Mobile 6 phones and is intended to let people restore all of their data on a new device if their old one is lost. The application is free, but users could incur data charges from their operator depending on their service plan, since the application synchronizes photos, videos, documents, contacts, music, calendar appointments and even text messages.
Two industry goliaths are claiming they can change the IT landscape for collaboration. That's the message delivered today by top executives from HP, who said they're joining forces with Microsoft to spread the companies' combined solution and services for unified communication.
Speaking here the Interop conference, which kicked off this morning in Las Vegas, executives announced a new $180 million partnership around UC. The new partnership could end up helping both companies that share over 100,000 customers today, according to Ann Livermore, executive vice president at HP.
A German organization plans to build a tool to help developers test whether software they're developing can support documents compatible with the latest version of the Open Office XML standard.
In an interoperability meeting hosted by Microsoft in London Monday, Fraunhofer FOKUS, a German research institute, said it would develop a document test library and a validation tool that will help developers verify if software they're building is conformant to the standard, said Doug Mahugh, the lead standards professional for the Microsoft Office Interoperability team.