Microsoft said on Thursday it would kick off its Xbox Live online gaming service in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in April, making inroads into Asian markets dominated by Sony's PlayStation 2 console. The launch in some of Asia's most Internet-wired regions plays to the strength of the Xbox hardware, which, unlike its competitor, comes ready for online play right out of the box.
"People can utilize their broadband connection at home, which is really a huge advantage for Asia, given that the penetration of broadband in homes throughout Asia is leading the world," Alan Bowman, general manager of Microsoft's Xbox business in Asia, told Reuters in an interview.
Take Stephen Witter, a report developer with a medical products company. Witter plans to replace an existing solution based on Crystal Reports with Reporting Services by the end of this month. Although admitting that the new product's price tag-free of charge, when used on the same system as SQL Server-was the first thing that caught his attention, Witter says Reporting Services has other qualities to recommend its use. "After using the Reporting Services beta for a while I started realizing how much more powerful it was than Crystal," he comments. "[Reporting Services] offers a much deeper level of control over the creation, and rendering, and management of reports, and it fits much better into our overall intranet development plans."
A variant of the computer virus that knocked SCO Group's Web site off the Internet earlier this week had no effect on Microsoft's Web site yesterday, causing security experts to describe the virus, MyDoom.B, as "poorly written." Analysts were concerned that the MyDoom variant would flood the Internet's DNSs with requests for Microsoft's Web site, making the site unavailable to users. But unlike the earlier attack on SCO's Web site, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Microsoft's Web site never really got off the ground.
The creators of MyDoom clearly attacked SCO because it is involved in a high-profile and high-stakes battle with Linux backers such as IBM and Novell. Microsoft--well, Microsoft is Microsoft. Who's next?
Microsoft's C# and .NET gain ground every day. While C# might or might not overcome Java in the following years, the fact remains that more and more programmers want the choice of C# among their developer tools. So, where does this situation leave Apple?
I believe that Apple has either already started porting an existing C#/.NET platform or they are building their own (maybe based on Mono or Portable.NET).
If we see a .NET-like implementation (with or without Windows.Forms) for Mac OS X this year, it probably means that Apple have licensed Microsoft's code. If we see such an implementation next year (around 2005) it will probably mean that Apple will be using Mono (which is arguably more mature than Portable.NET). But no matter which engine they will use, one thing is clear, Apple can't afford to not support at least one.
Increasingly, they say, the passion behind the operating system appeals to the disenfranchised, who see Linux in quasi-political "even quasi-religious" terms, but fail to comprehend the business and technical ideals behind it. As a result, they say, good technology is getting a bad rap.
Attacks on SCO Group have at times gone beyond the bounds of the computer world. The company spokesman said that SCO executives' lives have been threatened. When SCO Group chief executive officer Darl McBride appeared at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas in November to deliver a keynote speech at CD Expo, the company brought a sharpshooter along for protection.
"We were aware of specific threats from someone who had already served time behind bars," the spokesman said. "If they've been there [in prison] before and evidently aren't afraid to go back, we have to take them seriously."
Microsoft now offers a public preview of its 64-bit operating system for computers based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon 64 and Opteron processors. The program is designed to offer an early look at Windows XP 64-bit Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems, for computers based on the two relatively new AMD chips, Microsoft's Web site said.
While the OS has been in the hands of beta testers for some time, the preview will allow businesses to experiment with it and prepare for the final version, which is still under development, the site said.
Paving a path toward its next-generation Longhorn operating system, Microsoft next month will seed the developer community with an updated pre-release version of its next Visual Studio .NET platform, code-named Whidbey.
Ari Bixhorn, Microsoft's product manager for Visual Studio .NET, said a more mature build is slated for release at the company's upcoming Visual Studio conference slated for March in San Francisco. Bill Gates is scheduled to deliver a keynote on Whidbey.
"We're planning to go to a full public beta in mid-2004 and release-to-manufacturing (RTM) by the end of the year," Bixhorn added.
Information worker boss Jeff Raikes is pushing for economists to stop focusing on 'outputs,' and, instead, examine 'outcomes.' Microsoft Group VP Jeff Raikes says it's high time to move beyond the industry debate over whether information technology (IT) offers companies competitive advantage. Instead, he says, it's time to question how companies measure the impact of IT.
Raikes, along with executives from Microsoft, Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Xerox and myriad academic, government and private-industry representatives have been working for more than a year to establish a set of common metrics for measuring business productivity. On Monday, about 200 IWPC backers met in New York City as part of the first Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) assembly, called the Information Work Forum.
Microsoft is moving to a new phase in its competitive attack, arguing that the company is better than IBM and Linux when it comes to connecting different applications. The Redmond, Wash.-based software colossus had been contending, through a series of Microsoft-funded studies and "Get the Facts" advertisements, that Microsoft products have a lower "total cost of ownership" than Linux and other open-source software. Now Microsoft is trying to move the debate to the challenge of interoperability.
To patent or not to patent, that is the question for Microsoft. The software giant has been a prolific intellectual property mill over the past two decades, securing more than 3,000 U.S. patents. But as Microsoft and other large companies actively embrace open standards as a way to expand the market for Web services and other technology, they walk a fine line between promoting the adoption of standards and protecting valuable proprietary software.