Microsoft's chief software architect recently returned from one of his fabled "Think Weeks" full of ideas on mesh networking, unified networking and more.
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect sat down with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft to share some of his vision on where the industry is heading, what's next in Microsoft's sights, and the Next Big Thing for software developers. Gates granted eWEEK an exclusive interview at the VSLive conference in San Francisco last week, where he keynoted on his vision of Seamless Computing. Gates spoke with eWEEK on the day the European Union leveled a $600 million-plus sanction against the company, but Gates deferred questions on that to his attorneys.
On March 22, four days after returning from negotiations with the European Union in Brussels, and two days before the EU's ruling against Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for an interview with InformationWeek editors at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus. Following are some excerpts, which have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
InformationWeek: Can you tell us what the sticking point was over in Europe?
Ballmer: We and the commission agreed that we were able to, in our settlement proposals, substantively resolve the concrete issues that the commission had, but the commission was interested in getting something more formulaic in terms of guidance for the future. In the U.S., that's not the framework. In the framework here, there's not a formula that makes perfect sense. What was agreed to in the Consent Decree was a set of disclosures, obligations, and responsibilities, in addition to some other things, to try to ensure that there's both innovation and competition. And there was a set of guidelines articulated by the U.S. Court of Appeals in terms of the reasonableness of additional capabilities that we innovate and integrate into Windows, the reasonableness that the value they bring to some customers outweighs in some sense whatever impact they might have on competitors. We tried to speak to some of the same points in our settlement proposals, but the commissioner seemed to want something more concrete, more formulaic, and we weren't able to do that, even though what we offered in settlement goes well beyond what they'll ask for in remedy this week.
A new release of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE is poised to make devices more secure, reliable and better at handling multimedia files, Microsoft said Monday. Additionally, Windows CE 5.0 will bring improvements for developers by offering improved hardware support and a unified development environment, Microsoft said in a statement released at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco.
A beta version of Windows CE 5.0 is scheduled to be handed out to event attendees on Monday and be made available on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) on Thursday, Microsoft said. The final version of the operating system for embedded use is due midyear, the company said.
Microsoft: No Longhorn until 2006...at the earliest
In an interview with "Computerworld," Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia revealed that the next major version of Windows (code-named Longhorn) won't ship until 2006 at the earliest.
Microsoft's plan to fight the EU decision revealed
According to a report in "The Wall Street Journal," Microsoft's plan for countering the antitrust remedies that the European Union (EU) imposed this week will be to accuse European regulators of unfairly giving away the company's R&D. Furthermore, the company plans a standard appeal to Europe's Court of First Instance but will also petition the United States to challenge the EU ruling at the World Trade Organization (WTO), although the United States probably won't agree to such a tactic. "[The EU's ruling will result in] the broadest compulsory license of intellectual property since the European community was founded," Microsoft Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary Brad Smith said, adding that European and international laws that protect corporations' intellectual property will likely be the company's strongest defense.
Expanding its push into the Internet search space, Microsoft said Friday that it plans to launch Internet search services for news and Web logs later this year.
The Redmond, Washington, company said it is working on a natural language search engine, dubbed MSN Answerbot. This service will take questions from users and find answers on the Internet, rivaling a similar service from Ask Jeeves. No release date for MSN Answerbot has been set.
MSN Newsbot will gather news from more than 4,000 sources worldwide. The service is being tested at http://newsbot.msn.com/. Google and Yahoo also offer news search services.
Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Web logs, or "blogs," personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. Many consumers even use blogs as a news source, according to Microsoft.
A "mini bubble" has emerged among Internet companies, but it likely won't reach the level of the previous dot-com boom, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said.
"We are back in a mini-bubble era in terms of people expecting a lot of these valuations, but I don't think we'll see the same amount of exits the way we did," Gates said on Friday at the software giant's fifth annual online advertising conference, in response to a question.
Digital media delivery firm RealNetworks on Friday confirmed a buffer overflow vulnerability in its Helix Universal Server product, warning that a root exploit could give an attacker "inappropriate access" to compromised system.
A root exploit could give an attacker complete control over a susceptible machine to execute malicious code.
It is not the first security-related hiccup for Real's Helix products. Security consultants NGSSoftware has previously warned of high-risk buffer overruns in the Helix Universal Server 9.0 which could allow attackers to run code of their own choosing on a user's machine.
Microsoft's forthcoming SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 products will include functionality allowing developers to add business intelligence features to their applications, a Microsoft executive announced Friday.
With the new Visual Studio Controls for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, enterprise developers can add data from back-end systems to their applications without the need to build complicated connections to those systems, said Bill Baker, general manager for SQL Server at Microsoft.
Microsoft often takes heat for pushing too aggressively into new markets, as shown by a major antitrust ruling this week. But in at least one area -- Internet searching -- Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer says the company didn't initially push hard enough.
"It's probably the thing that I feel worst about over the last several years -- us not making the R & D investment ourselves up front, but rather outsourcing," Ballmer said yesterday. "It's funny, people sometimes say Microsoft wants to do it all. This is a case where we actually didn't do it all. Shoot, I wish we had done it all."
Microsoft's CEO Thursday declared MSN would enter the search space with its own algorithmic engine within the next year and predicted that eventually "all marketing will have the characteristics of online" as PCs become connected with TV sets.
Speaking to a rapt crowd of about 500 crammed into the main hall of Microsoft's conference center, Ballmer said, "there's no magic about search; all it takes is good, hard work," and when MSN's algorithmic search hits the market, "you'll see good competition in the search arena." Ballmer made his remarks as the company kicked off the two-day event at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.