Microsoft platform architect Pat Helland has lots to say about SOAs, cities and hooking systems together. In a company where most of the 58,000 employees are paid to sweat the details, Microsoft's Pat Helland is somewhat of an anomaly. He is a big-picture thinker.
Nine-year Microsoft veteran Helland came to Microsoft from Tandem Computers, where he was chief architect and senior implementer of the transaction monitoring facility. He has done lots of work in high-end computing arenas, such as parallel processing, clustering, 64-bit computing and the like. He was one of the chief architects on the Microsoft Transaction Server.
IBM isn't the only company talking up service-oriented architectures. Microsoft has a grand SOA plan of its own. With much fanfare, IBM rolled out its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy on Wednesday. Microsoft has yet to do the same. But that doesn't mean the Redmond software giant is sitting on the SOA sidelines.
"Microsoft's strategy for SOA has two major parts to it," said Pat Helland, platform architect with Microsoft's.Net Enterprise Architecture Team (NEAT). Helland is one of Microsoft's leading thinkers on enterprise architectural issues, including SOAs.
Dell recaptured the lead from HP for total worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter of 2004, a period when the overall PC market saw double-digit growth on strong U.S. and European demand, according to IDC.
For the quarter, Dell had year-on-year growth of 28 percent to nearly 7.7 million unit shipments. That represented 18.6 percent of the 41.2-million-unit worldwide PC market for the quarter. Overall the market grew compared against the year-ago quarter by 16.5 percent.
Executives from Microsoft's security group demonstrated some of the new security features planned for the next major Windows XP software update, known as Service Pack 2, and faced persistent questions Tuesday from customers about whether the new features will interfere with other security technology.
Rebecca Norlander, group manager for the SBTU, spoke with Nash and confirmed that a second test version of Service Pack 2, known as Release Candidate 2 (or RC2) will be released in May, and that the final version of XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is still on schedule for the first half of the year. More release candidates are possible after the RC2 release, depending on customer feedback, Norlander said.
Microsoft has hired one of its worst enemies, the SuSE Linux salesman whose efforts led the city of Munich to adopt Linux and open-source software instead of Microsoft's products.
Karl Aigner, formerly SuSE's account representative for Munich, is overseeing sales of Microsoft's data center products to midsize companies in Germany. He began his new role April 1, Microsoft said Tuesday.
"I think Microsoft sees the European public sector as the vanguard of the fight against open source," said RedMonk analyst James Governor, and hiring Aigner will give the company insight into its foe's methods. Microsoft is a "learning organization, and one of the ways of learning is bringing in different ways of thinking," he added.
Microsoft Tuesday put into beta testing a significant update of its OneNote digital note-taking application that offers new video and Pocket PC support, better integration with Office 2003, realtime collaboration features and APIs to allow extensibility by ISVs and solution providers.
The preview of OneNote Service Pack 1 (SP1) was made available and the final version of the service pack will ship by the end of the summer, shortly after Office 2003 SP1, said Bobby Moore, product manager at Microsoft Office OneNote. He said Office 2003 SP1 is scheduled for release in late June and early July.
Microsoft officials are mulling potential changes to the company's enterprise volume licensing program that could let large systems integrators and service providers license software on behalf of their largest customers.
Enterprises now must negotiate their own volume agreements with Microsoft, even when the software is hosted and managed by a third party. New solutions, sources said, could allow pay-as-you-go licenses rather than requiring users to pay for and get tied up by a long-term agreement.
Windows Media 9 Series has gained support from a handful of broadcast companies as well as from hardware and software production companies, Microsoft announced at the National Association of Broadcasters 2004 (NAB2004) trade show. Two consumer TV services, VOOM and US Digital Television (USDTV), announced that they will use Windows Media 9 Series to deliver programming, and companies including Adobe Systems, BOXX Technologies, and CineForm announced new Windows XP-based solutions for High-Definition (HD) video production.
Microsoft is on a roll. I lost the count of how many cases has Microsoft settled.
Microsoft on Monday reached a settlement with consumers in Minnesota to end an antitrust suit that claimed that the company had overcharged for its Windows operating system and its Office application software.
According to information posted to the Web site for the Fourth Judicial District Court of Minnesota, Microsoft now has a preliminary deal in the case. The court reported that the settlement terms will remain confidential until they are finalized in early July. However, the court said the jury that's overseeing the case has been discharged and that the trial process related to the claim has been completed.
Microsoft's competitors first took on the Redmond, Wash.-based company in the marketplace and lost. They went to the U.S. courts and lost. They went to U.S. regulators and lost. Now that the competitors have exhausted their domestic recourses, they have turned their eyes to what they hope are the more hospitable shores on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The European Union has now handed Microsoft's competitors at least a partial victory--something they were unable to achieve through free and fair competition in the market. In so doing, the European Union will undermine the principles of global economic cooperation and will further deepen the chasm that separates the two continents.