Microsoft will put a more human face on its upcoming global multimillion dollar advertising program for its Windows Server System. The company, which is set to announce the new ad campaign at its Silicon Valley campus on Thursday afternoon, will spend tens of millions of dollars on this worldwide campaign, which will feature specific IT staffers from enterprise and mid-level firms that use the Windows Server System solutions.
The campaign is designed to be customer-centric; each ad will picture and name individual staff members of the particular company that is the subject of the ad. The first wave of ads will feature four Microsoft global customers: Motorola, Siemens AG, Reuters PLC and Toyota Motor.
Microsoft said it will delay making any modifications to its Windows operating system and Internet Explorer Web browser, based on the Eolas patent case. Microsoft said in a statement Thursday that it will hold off on implementing previously announced changes until its efforts to appeal the suit or invalidate the patent are settled.
Microsoft said in the statement that the proposed tweaks could inconvenience Web developers and other software companies and may not be necessary, if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office invalidates Eolas' patent. The federal office has launched a rare review of the Eolas patent, based on claims that other people had developed similar technology before Eolas.
Microsoft has announced plans to remove Internet Explorer browser support for user names and passwords as a means of protecting users from several known IE security holes.
The software giant did not say when the long-delayed IE patch would be released but, in a knowledge base article, Microsoft confirmed plans to modify the way IE handles user credentials.
The most likely scenario is for Microsoft to issue the patch in its next monthly scheduled release (second Tuesday in February) but the company has made it clear it would go out-of-cycle in emergency cases.
Microsoft revealed this week that its first Microsoft Office 2003 service release, due in late spring, will be a major release that includes new security features and major improvements to the two new Office applications, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 and Microsoft Office OneNote 2003. In a post-release meeting late last year, the Office team discussed some of these improvements, and although the representatives I spoke with at the time were unwilling to give specific details about the changes, a list of those improvements is slowly becoming available.
Microsoft has just been awarded two United States patents for a proprietary method of packing a high-definition television signal onto a hard drive, internetnews.com has learned. The development could help propel Microsoft's digital media strategy, whereby the company has, since late 2002, worked to position its Windows Media 9 technology as an industry standard for the delivery of high-definition (1280 x 720) video streams directly to the PC.
A video-compression expert, who requested anonymity because he is working on related technology, called the concept very interesting. "It gives you a system where a single decoder can handle standard definition video and high definition, too," the source said.
A former employee of Microsoft was sentenced on Wednesday to 21 months in prison for obtaining software meant for corporate use and selling it for personal profit, local authorities said. Wilson Delancy, 36, was ordered to pay more than $4 million in restitution to the world's largest software maker for buying stolen software from another former employee, Kori Robin Brown, in order to sell it for personal gain, John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, said in a statement. Brown was sentenced to 17 months in prison last November for stealing software meant for corporate use.
A federal judge has found that Microsoft encroached upon patents held by a Tucson, Arizona-based company for a process that improves the quality of images displayed on computer screens and paper printouts.
Research Corporation Technologies Inc. (RCT) sued Microsoft on Dec. 21, 2001, in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, in Tucson. RCT charges that Microsoft uses technology covered by its patents in the Windows operating system as well as Office applications, said Brian Ferguson, an attorney with McDermott, Will & Emery who represents RCT, on Wednesday.
A new version of the Mydoom e-mail worm is circulating on the Internet, according to warnings from antivirus companies. The worm, named Mydoom-B, is similar to a worm that appeared on Monday, but contains a scheduled denial-of-service attack against Microsoft's Web site and a feature that blocks access to antivirus Web sites on infected machines, according to warnings from antivirus companies Wednesday.
Microsoft could hardly be called an open-source supporter, but the company will probably open more of its source code with a new expansion of the Shared Source Initiative, this time to include the source code to the other half of the company's crown jewels, Microsoft Office. The company already shares the source code to all Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 versions and much of the source code to Windows CE .NET with select partners, governments, educational institutions, and even technology enthusiasts.
More of Microsoft's $6.8 billion research budget will be directed toward making its software more secure and reliable, chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said at a European technology conference. "For Microsoft, security will continue to be our top R&D investment for years to come," the Reuters news service reported Bill Gates as telling industry experts at a Microsoft conference in Prague.
Gates also said that only 20 percent of customers use up-to-date software, a figure he would like to see increased to 90 percent.