Borland is losing two top engineers to Microsoft in a brain drain reminiscent of a period several years ago when Borland sued Microsoft for such practices.
The Scotts Valley, Calif., company is losing Chief Technology Officer Blake Stone as of Feb. 6, according to sources. Stone is traveling to Microsoft to pursue "an offer he could not refuse," they said.
The other engineer, Chuck Jazdzewski, formerly chief scientist and architect of Borland's Delphi technology, left the company last month and is said to be joining Microsoft's Avalon team. Avalon is the presentation layer of Microsoft's upcoming "Longhorn" operating system, which is expected in 2005 or 2006.
A move by Microsoft to extend support for an older version of Windows underscores a new reality for the software giant: Convincing customers to upgrade is becoming much more difficult.
Earlier this month, Microsoft backtracked from a decision to end support for Windows 98 and other older Windows versions, pledging to continue support until 2006.
While many customers applauded the move, some analysts said that the decision may be more than an act of goodwill. According to recent surveys, about one-quarter of all PCs run Windows 98 or older versions of Windows. "Better to have people stay on Windows 98 than to start investigating things like Linux," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Microsoft's new Business Portal now builds atop the Windows SharePoint Services that are part and parcel of the Windows 2003 Server operating system. That means the product, officially dubbed the Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal 2.0, can now share SharePoint Web Parts, prebuilt code, useable on that platform. There are Microsoft and third-party Web Parts such as document libraries, calendars and editors. Release 2.0 is shipping now, Microsoft said.
Microsoft said it was working to ward off an Internet virus that was set to attack the software company's Web site on Tuesday. "We're definitely doing everything we can to make sure that our customers who need to get to our site are able to do so," Christopher Budd, Microsoft's security program manager, said Friday.
On Thursday, Microsoft said it would to pay $250,000 to anyone who helps authorities find and prosecute the author of the virus. The cash reward is the third so far under a $5 million program Microsoft announced in early November to help U.S. authorities catch authors of unusually damaging Internet infections aimed at consumers of the company's software products.
If your servers aren't properly patched and your systems secured, it's getting harder and harder to blame Microsoft. Perhaps no company in the industry is working harder at making sure the public - both IT and at-large - knows what steps to take to secure its products.
One of the latest offerings is a monthly security newsletter, the first issue of which appeared last December. The newsletter is packed with relevant, crucial information. One example: A Q&A section asks the question "I received an e-mail telling me I should remove the Teddy Bear virus that is contained in a file named jdbgmgr.exe. Should I follow these instructions?" The file is a Microsoft java debugger file, and shouldn't be removed.
Longhorn details are no longer quite so close to the vest as Microsoft is now releasing more details on how to build Longhorn desktop applications-and pushing developers to crack open the early SDK, and start writing code with some of the pre-release tools.
The latest Microsoft revelations, posted through MSDN, position Longhorn development as an evolution of today's .NET managed code and the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to development, rather than a revolutionary break with the past.
Microsoft released Windows Storage Server last September. WSS, available only through third-party storage hardware vendors, replaced three-year-old Windows Powered Network Attached Storage. Zane Adams, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft's enterprise storage division, recently talked to MCP Magazine about WSS.
Q: How stable is WSS? Have you encountered many bugs in the product since the September launch?
It's been stable. Absolutely no issues, because its core function is file and print. It's been optimized and tested for that, and we've optimized it to each hardware [solution] with our partners. More and more mission-critical data is going on it. I've seen customers with10-15 terabyte boxes and higher running for a long, long time.
Microsoft said yesterday it was working to ward off an Internet virus that was set to attack the software company's Web site on Tuesday.
"We're definitely doing everything we can to make sure that our customers who need to get to our site are able to do so," said Christopher Budd, Microsoft's security program manager.
The virus, called MyDoom.B, spreads by e-mail and causes infected computers to launch an electronic attack again Microsoft's Web site. The virus is a variant of "MyDoom.A," which spread very rapidly across computers this week.
Microsoft will formally launch its Windows Speech Server at Avios-SpeechTEK, which this year will be combined with Microsoft's VSLive! and Mobile Developer Conference (DevCon) 2004 shows, said David Lazar, director of developer tools product management, Microsoft. The company also is slated to ship the product around the same time, but Lazar did not provide a specific general-availability date.
Speech Server is designed to run on Windows Server 2003 and supports Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), a standard backed by Microsoft. It is designed to run speech-enabled Web applications for telephony-based speech as well as applications that can, for example, trigger a command in an e-mail client or browser when a voice command is given over the phone.
"Halo 2," the sequel to the best-selling Xbox game ever and one of the most-anticipated titles of 2004, will ship this fall, Microsoft said on Friday, dashing hopes that the game would be out sooner. Many industry observers as well as fans had expected "Halo 2" to ship as early as the spring -- possibly in March or April -- and retailers had been counting on a June release date. But a spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that the "Halo 2" launch is now set for the later part of the year. A firm launch date was not available, although it would be in Microsoft's next fiscal year, which starts in July, the spokeswoman said.