WinInsider

Microsoft is acknowledging that a substantial number of its MSN services customers are experiencing a major service outage, but says so far the cause of the outage has not been identified. A Microsoft spokeswoman notes that the first reports of problems accessing MSN Messenger, Hotmail and other MSN-related services, such as Passport, began at 8:30 a.m. PST on Friday.

Microsoft will use its Mobile DevCon later this month to talk up its next release of its SQL Server CE platform, version 3.0, code-named "Laguna." Like Yukon -- the next version of the full-fledged SQL Server release -- Laguna is unlikely to debut before mid-2005.

Sources say that Microsoft hopes to deliver a first beta of Laguna in conjunction with "Yukon" SQL Server Beta 2, which is expected by mid-2004. The Redmond software maker plans to release Laguna to manufacturing right alongside Yukon.

One year after sparking angry outcries from a rival specification faction, Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems and Tibco Software have completed their specification for a key component of Web services messaging. According to a Microsoft document, the four companies have published a completed a spec for WS-ReliableMessaging, which allows messages to be delivered between distributed applications in the wake of software, system or network failures.

Lindows.com, a maker of low-cost computers running Linux software, on Friday said it had halted operations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in the latest round of its cat-and-mouse legal battle with Microsoft. Lindows, based in San Diego, California, said it had withdrawn from the three countries after it received legal papers demanding that it pay a fine of up to 100,000 euros a day for failing to comply with an earlier court order.

A federal judge in San Jose, Calif., has denied Microsoft's request to have an antitrust case against it moved to a federal court in Washington. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., had argued that the case filed by Seattle rival RealNetworks should be moved to Washington state because both companies are based there.

But U.S. District Judge James Ware said in a filing Thursday that it was appropriate to keep the case in California, in part because many big players in the digital media industry are located there.

Microsoft not particularly interested in drafting its own EU remedy
Antitrust regulators from the European Union (EU) are pressuring Microsoft to craft its own remedies for its violations of European antitrust law, but the company is particularly uninterested in doing so, largely because it claims to have done nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Microsoft is very much interested in a settlement, which could avoid the all-too-public denouncements from the EU in the event that the company is, as expected, declared guilty of sweeping antitrust abuses and levied a set of remedies.

More exclusive information about Windows Server 2003 R2
First revealed on the SuperSite for Windows, Windows Server 2003 R2 is targeted for a summer 2005, according to a source at Microsoft. The R2 release will combine the gold Windows 2003 release with Windows 2003 SP1 and a host of out-of-band, or "Feature Pack" updates the company has released since last April.

One of the most misleading phrases in marketing is "digital quality" -- as in "Buy this $40 DVD player and enjoy your movies in digital quality!" We all know that just being digital doesn't make something better -- in fact, it can sometimes make it much worse. What's more, digital formats are not often comparable, and the quality of two seemingly similar formats can be drastically different.

This is especially true in the world of digital video, where such great strides have been made in recent years that it's nearly impossible to consider modern codecs in the same breath as those from even five years ago. There are literally dozens of video compression options out there, some of them with multiple different implementations, making for a dizzying array of digital video options.

By acting as a middleman, Microsoft is building a new audience for key server applications and gaining experience that could prove valuable in the nascent market for utility computing.

A growing number of Microsoft server applications--most notably its Exchange e-mail server--are being resold as hosted services by third-party vendors that target small-business users. Analysts and partners give credit to Microsoft for making its products more host-friendly and say the software giant has shown no interest in providing such services on its own.

The official line out of Microsoft is that delays in the SQL Server roadmap will not affect delivery of the "Longhorn" version of Windows. Longhorn contains a storage technology, called Windows Future Storage, or WinFS, that is shared technology with the Yukon database.

Tom Rizzo, director of SQL Server product management for Microsoft, flatly asserts that, although Longhorn shares technology with Yukon, the Yukon delay doesn't equal a delay for Longhorn. "There's no butterfly effect," Rizzo says.

A top European Union antitrust official said Thursday that settlement talks were continuing with Microsoft even as the European Commission prepares to decide the long-running antitrust probe in two weeks.

"We are engaging in formal discussions and settlement discussions," Philip Lowe, the director general of the Commission's competition department, told Dow Jones Newswires on the sidelines of a conference.

European regulators have set March 15 and 22 as the dates for final reviews in Brussels, where representatives of antitrust offices in the 15 EU countries comment on the decision and proposed penalties. The Commission usually adopts the decision a day or two after the last closed-door session.