Microsoft's video game chief on Wednesday called the holiday season "very good" for the Xbox game player, but shied away from setting a launch date for the widely anticipated game, "Halo 2."
Bach claimed Microsoft's Xbox outsold Nintendo's GameCube in the last two weeks of December, despite GameCube's lower price, $99 versus Xbox's $179. Nintendo's move to a $99 price spurred a boom in GameCube sales that brought it closer to second-place Xbox in terms of U.S. installed base of users.
Bach, in Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, declined to commit to a launch for highly touted "Halo 2." The original "Halo" is the Xbox's top seller, and most expectations have been for the new game to come out in early April or thereabouts.
During his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to show new technology for connecting digital content on Windows PCs to home entertainment centers, TVs and portable devices. Gates will announce the new products Wednesday night as part of his keynote address at the CES, an increasingly important venue for Microsoft and other technology giants to tout their consumer strategies.
The technology, dubbed Windows Media Center Extender, will allow TVs and other devices to display content from PCs equipped with Windows Media Center software. Media Center is a version of the PC operating system tweaked for handling digital media and entertainment tasks.
Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Tibco Software on Wednesday published a specification, WS-Eventing, which is intended to provide a common way of communicating events within and between Web services. The companies plan to submit the specification for consideration by an industry standards body such as W3C or OASIS. This submission will happen after seeking feedback and testing for interoperability during the next several months, according to a Microsoft representative. WS-Eventing is intended to provide a common way to communicate events, which are being defined as real-world occurrences that trigger actions in software, such as an order being placed or a package being shipped.
Microsoft's new SPOT wireless data watch, being introduced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, is not a finished product. Why isn't the watch ready? Because the value-adds that are supposed to make SPOT more than just an expensive watch are, at this point, either missing or poorly implemented. The news feeds are useless. There are no traffic reports or weather warnings. The minute-by-minute sports scores have yet to appear and initially will be available only for college basketball. And the software that's supposed to link my Outlook calendar to my SPOT watch is currently broken because Microsoft killed the old version without posting the new.
Microsoft released a removal tool for the MSBlast worm on Monday after Internet service providers complained that home users' PCs infected with the malicious program are still causing network congestion.
"For many users in this situation, there is little indication that they are infected other than possible performance degradation," Microsoft said. "And those infected are still actively transmitting the worm, causing Internet congestion in the process."
Microsoft's $441 million settlement of lawsuits in nine states alleging it overcharged purchasers of Windows has touched off a rare public fight over legal fees among plaintiffs' lawyers. Big plaintiffs' firms that settled the class-action cases, including Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach and Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, are resisting an attempt by fellow trial lawyers Michael Hausfeld and Stanley Chesley to share the legal fees.
Microsoft on Tuesday made broadly available a beta version of its Windows Server 2003 for systems using the Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) 64-bit Opteron processor. The beta version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems had been available to a small group of testers in a "technical beta" since October but is now available for anyone interested in trying it out through a customer preview program, said John Borozan, a product manager at Microsoft.
Microsoft expects tens of thousands of users to download the beta of the server software, which is unchanged since the release of the technical beta, Borozan said. Several hundred testers participated in the technical beta, he said.
Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would start selling a new version of its Office e-mail, document, spreadsheet and presentation software suite for Apple Macintosh personal computer during the first half of 2004.
Among the new features in the latest Mac version of Office are a project manager that allows users to track e-mails, documents, contacts and meetings related to a project and also take notes within Word, the document program.
Buyers of Office v. X for Mac will be able to upgrade to Office 2004 for free, Microsoft said.
Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed a shakeup within the company's e-business server group. David Kiker, who had been general manager of the server group--which includes the upcoming BizTalk Server 2004 or Voyager--is no longer with that effort. Ted Kummert, who had headed up subscription services for MSN, is now spearheading the effort as group vice president of e-business servers, a spokesman confirmed.
Sources both inside and outside the company said the group's inability to ship products on time took its toll. BizTalk 2004, with a new rules engine, is in beta now but was supposed to ship last year.
Microsoft is set to reveal more details of the latest version of its digital cable software at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Microsoft TV Foundation Edition 1.5 is designed to be used by cable operators with their existing hardware and network systems to offer cable TV viewers features like video on demand (VOD) and advanced parental screening.
The upcoming update will build on the 1.0 version by offering improved interactive program guide (IPG) features and new tools for use with VOD, high definition television (HDTV) and digital video recorder (DVR) technology, Microsoft said on Tuesday. Specific features include on-demand storefronts for in-home shopping and a new programming recommendation service, dubbed Best Bets, that uses people's viewing history to help them find VOD movies to watch.