WinInsider

A Chinese software company announced on Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with Microsoft to help popularize the Office productivity package in Chinese schools.

Tengtu International said its Beijing subsidiary, the largest supplier of educational software for China's elementary and secondary schools, will develop an "Education Resource Kit for Office" to integrate the company's educational software and services with Microsoft's Office 2003.

Microsoft on Wednesday is set to unveil enhancements to the VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) capabilities of Windows CE in the upcoming Version 5.0, as well as several partnerships with manufacturers and integrators that will use the platform.

The operating system forms the basis of Microsoft's platforms for embedded, automotive and mobile computing. A lot of vendors want to add VOIP as an application to wireless handhelds and other devices, said John Starkweather, a product manager in Microsoft's Embedded Devices Group. The Redmond, Washington, company plans to announce the VOIP enhancements at the Voice on the Net (VON) conference taking place this week in Santa Clara, California.

Microsoft, which has struggled to gain share in the intensely competitive sports video games market, on Tuesday said it would not release new versions of its sports games this autumn.

"After analyzing market conditions and customer feedback, we're focused on closing the quality gap between our sports line-up and that of our competitors," Kevin Browne, who manages sports games for Microsoft Game Studios, said. "Therefore we will not be shipping new versions of our sports games this fall."

I take less offense at the notion that Microsoft should be required to license all protocols and technology required for proper interoperability. What really annoys me, however, is when design decisions for Windows get taken away from programmers in Redmond and handed to regulators in Brussels. I also resent the tendency to retroactively penalize action which, up till a negative antitrust ruling, a company has every reason to expect was perfectly legal.

If Bill Gates gets his way, within 10 years speech technology will be ubiquitous and the unrelenting security headaches of today will be only a distant nightmare. Interviewed by Gartner CEO Michael Fleisher on stage here at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2004, Gates also touched on the importance of security, Web services, and visual modeling technologies.

As Microsoft has reiterated at every turn, security is also a primary area of investment within the software company. Spam, for instance, is a particular area of focus. The most dangerous aspect of spam is social engineering attacks that spoof sender identities, Gates said.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Monday pointed to 2006 as the release year for the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Speaking at Gartner's Symposium/ITexpo event in San Diego, Gates stopped short of setting 2006 as the year for Longhorn, but said that industry speculation that the operating system will come out in 2006 is "probably valid speculation."

Completion of Microsoft's Project Green initiative to bring its four business application suites together on a single code base is still two years away, but the company is already trying to standardize some features across the line.

At its Convergence conference here last week, officials of the Redmond, Wash., company discussed existing and future application extensions and add-on modules it is calling Surround Applications. Similar to Project Green, Surround Applications such as Microsoft's Customer Relationship Management and MBN (Microsoft Business Network) provide functionality that spans all four of the company's suites: Great Plains, Navision, Axapta and Solomon.

Microsoft on Monday cut the price on its Xbox video game console, in an expected move seen as a boost to the game publishing industry ahead of its biggest gathering of the year.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, cut the Xbox price to $149.99 from $179.99 and also trimmed prices on software such as the karaoke game "Xbox Music Mixer," "Project Gotham Racing 2" and "Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge."

The Xbox price cut is effective Tuesday, while the software cuts take effect Monday and Tuesday. The Xbox was released at $299 in November 2001.

"We are going to help users be in control," Bill Gates declared Friday at MSN's Strategic Account Summit, speaking out against spyware to an audience of advertisers and marketers -- exactly the type of people interested in the kind of data such programs, at least the legitimate ones, harvest.

"So-called spyware is turning the Internet into a billboard. We are going to help users be in control and know what [spyware] is on their system and if they don't want it they can get it off their system," said Gates. The chairman of Microsoft spoke before an audience of about 500 near the end of the two-day conference for clients and partners.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) recommended that Apple Computer stop advertising its Power Mac G5 as "the world's fastest personal computer" after reviewing independent tests that refute that claim. Acting on a tip from Dell, the BBB told Apple that its advertising could deceive consumers, which need accurate information on which to base their purchases.

"The National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus recommended that Apple, Inc. discontinue comparative performance claims regarding its Power Mac G5 personal computer," the organization wrote in a release. "NAD determined that the evidence provided by Apple did not provide a reasonable basis for its broad unqualified claims that its Power Mac G5 is 'the world's fastest, most powerful computer' and that it 'edged out the competition on integer' [processing performance]. NAD further determined that the advertiser's claim, 'the world's first 64-bit processor for personal computers' could reasonably be interpreted to apply to workstations ... this claim is [also] unsupported by the evidence."