Microsoft gave users another reason to download its free SQL Server Reporting Services add-on when it acquired small, privately held ActiveViews. Actually, "small" in this context is something of a misnomer: With five employees, ActiveViews is downright tiny. Nevertheless, it does offer a Web-based report authoring and end-user query tool based on Microsoft's .NET framework-and designed to exploit SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
Microsoft officials position Reporting Services as a one-stop shop to create, manage, and publish ad hoc and production reports.
Microsoft is throwing big money at Windows Update, the company's infrastructure and technologies for distributing patches to its ubiquitous Windows software. "I don't know if everyone understands how much we're investing in Windows Update and what a service it is. We've spent about $60 million on Windows Update," Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president for platforms, said during his keynote address on Tuesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle.
Microsoft once envisioned selling a computer to every household. But in the United States, people are now buying more than one. At the same time, computer use is still low in developing countries such as China and India. Those emerging markets are where the industry's growth is expected to explode in coming years.
Both trends present huge opportunities for Microsoft and for computer makers, executives said yesterday at the company's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, going on this week in Seattle.
Almost 1.5 million Windows customers downloaded a cleanup tool for the Sasser Internet worm in the first two days after Microsoft began offering the tool on Sunday, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.
The number of downloads is one indication of the number of Windows computers infected with Sasser and it is bigger than most estimates from computer security companies. Still, the total number of infected Windows systems could be even higher, especially when infections on computer networks are taken into account, the spokeswoman said.
Microsoft has synchronized development efforts for the client and server versions of Longhorn, the code name for the next Windows release, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.
"Today, the Longhorn client and the Longhorn server are tied together," Jim Allchin, vice president of Microsoft's platforms group, said in a keynote presentation at the company's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here.
Microsoft, just weeks away from shipping the next release of its Office suite for the Mac OS X, has launched a new version of its MSN Messenger instant-messaging client for Apple Computer Inc.'s operating system.
The Redmond, Wash., software maker on Tuesday released MSN Messenger for Mac Version 4.0 with additional integration into its new Office 2004 for Mac, a new feature for stopping unwanted messages and improvements to file sharing and alerting.
After a year of tackling the Windows security nightmare, Microsoft has killed its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) project and later this year plans to detail a revised security plan for Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, company executives said.
On Tuesday, Microsoft executives confirmed that NGSCB will be canned. The project, dreamed up with Intel in 2002, was once code-named Palladium.
"We're evaluating how these NGSCB capabilities should be integrated into Longhorn, but we don't know exactly how it'll be manifested. A lot of decisions have yet to be made," said Mario Juarez, product manager in Microsoft's Security and Technology Business Unit. "We're going to come out later this year with a complete story."
It has been declining for years, but an icon of the personal computer revolution was finally given its eulogy yesterday by someone who has closely watched its rise and fall.
"I think this is the first time I can say that the floppy disk is dead," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates declared as he and others from the company demonstrated some of the new ways they envision people using key-chain-size USB drives instead.
As their annual hardware developers' convention kicked off yesterday, Microsoft executives touted a touchy-feely future of computerized "experiences" -- high-tech homes, offices and automobiles filled with digital music, movies and communications.
Yesterday Microsoft executives conceded that the software giant needs to deal with fundamental issues -- including security -- before it can convince people to invest in futuristic technology.
"If you do all the fundamentals, you don't get a lot of credit," Jim Allchin, who heads Microsoft's Windows division, told the audience of hardware engineers and developers. "If you mess up the fundamentals, you get all the abuse."
Microsoft is expected to announce on Wednesday a partnership with IronPort, adopting its antispam protections for MSN and Hotmail e-mail. Under the agreement, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft will use Ironport's "bonded sender" e-mail certification program, according to Ironport representatives. That means that Microsoft will defer to Ironport's list of qualifying senders before allowing their e-mail through its gates.