Microsoft has three options in the Comcast-Disney takeover fight: play the savior, the banker or stay on the sidelines. Microsoft, which holds 7.4 percent of Comcast and has helped the company in deals in the past, is saying nothing about Comcast's bid, or about any role that it might play. Wall Street investment bankers say they have not yet detected any signs of the Microsoft deal machine rumbling into motion.
Still, Microsoft has options that are intriguing, and potentially decisive. And its "no comment" does not rule out a future role.
BetaNews has learned that Thursday's leak of the Windows 2000 source code originated not from Microsoft, but from long-time Redmond partner Mainsoft. Analysis indicates files within the leaked archive are only a subset of the Windows source code, which was licensed to Mainsoft for use in the company's MainWin product. MainWin utilizes the source to create native Unix versions of Windows applications.
Mainsoft says it has incorporated millions of lines of untouched Windows code into MainWin. Microsoft has opened an investigation with the FBI and says its internal security in Redmond was not affected.
Microsoft Group Vice President Jeff Raikes says it's time to move beyond the industry debate over whether IT offers companies a competitive advantage. Instead, Raikes says, it's time to question how companies measure the impact of IT.
Raikes and executives from Microsoft, Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Xerox, as well as academic, government and private-industry representatives, have been working for more than a year to establish a common set of tools for measuring business productivity. Last week, about 200 Information Work Productivity Council backers met in New York as part of the first IWPC assembly.
When Microsoft seeds the developer community next month with an updated pre-release version of its "Whidbey" Visual Studio .NET, it won't neglect the emerging mobile market.
Whidbey will come equipped with a vastly improved implementation of the .NET Compact Framework -- Microsoft's tool for building apps that run on smart devices such as Pocket PCs and Smartphones.
Version 2.0 will add significant features, such as support for Web services and for the mobile SQL Server CE database. The software will be distributed next month at Microsoft's Mobile Developers Conference in San Francisco.
May 1 is a deadline, when new EU antitrust laws and procedural guidelines are scheduled to kick in. The new laws cover a wide spectrum of business activities, from mergers and cartels to dominant and monopoly companies. Also, the current approval process involves 15 EU countries; after May 1, the number jumps to 25 countries.
It is unclear whether the Microsoft case would come under the new regulations if the case drags on beyond May 1.
RealNetworks filed court papers opposing Microsoft's effort to move the streaming-media company's antitrust suit against the Redmond company from San Jose to Seattle.
RealNetworks disputed Microsoft's allegations that it chose San Jose as the venue to tap a more favorable jury pool. RealNetworks also presented a long list of California-based companies and people -- including executives from Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems -- that it may call as witnesses.
Microsoft had said that both companies are based in Seattle, making it a more logical and convenient venue.
Microsoft was busy denying rumors late Thursday that a copy of the source code for Windows NT and Windows 2000 had leaked and been posted on the Internet.
Several tech sites, most notably Slashdot, had message threads reporting that the code had leaked and speculation was rampant on how the alleged leak may have happened.
If the code is in fact in the open, the potential economic damage to the company would be incalculable. The Windows code is Microsoft's main intellectual property asset and is the basis for its ability to dominate the desktop OS market.
Microsoft's Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here.
Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.
Cisco Systems and Microsoft will begin selling bundles of their lower-priced networking equipment to small businesses in April, the two companies announced Wednesday.
The first combination is a Cisco ethernet broadband router, meant for companies of fewer than 20 employees, and Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition, which is itself a combination of the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server software. Included in the deal is integration support and software so router and server can work together.
A US district court judge put Microsoft's trademark-infringement case against Lindows.com on indefinite hold this week, pending an appeals court ruling that could strip the software giant of its Windows trademarks. The judge's decision is bad news for Microsoft, which sued Lindows.com last year because the name Lindows is too similar to Windows. The lawsuit backfired when Lindows.com challenged the Windows trademark, noting that the word windows is a generic term and thus can't be legally protected with a mark. This week's ruling means that an appeals court will decide whether windows is indeed a generic term; if so, Microsoft could lose its trademark.