Microsoft executives have kicked off the campaign for the company's next big Windows push: Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). In a Webcast Tuesday morning, Microsoft Security Business Unit Vice President Mike Nash said to expect the service packa major releaseto enhance security in four ways. It will remedy open ports, malicious e-mail attachments, malicious Web content and buffer overrun attacks, Nash said.
The next full-fledged upgrade to Windows XP, code-named Windows "Longhorn," is not expected to debut until 2006 at the earliest.
SP2 will include a greatly enhanced version of Microsoft's Internet Connection Firewall (renamed "Windows Firewall") that will allow users greater control over the Internet access of their applications, Nash said.
The reasons for embracing Windows Server 2003--and the problems-- differ with every company. To understand exactly what these rollouts take, we talked to four project managers at four very different companies, who learned four very different lessons.
From a small ISP running homemade hardware who has casually upgraded four servers so far, to a giant Midwest manufacturing firm with thousands of servers, the bottom line is this: Windows 2003 is uncommonly polished for a first release, but there are still glitches to watch out for.
Microsoft will use January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to announce availability of wrist watches and wireless services based on its Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT), a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday.
It was first announced at CES in January 2003, and SPOT watches were originally supposed to go on sale from Fossil Inc. and other watchmakers in time for the holiday shopping season. Last minute tweaks to a radio chip in the watches delayed their introduction, according to a source familiar with the effort.
The problem has now been fixed and Fossil has manufactured ''many thousands'' of SPOT watches that are ready for retail next month, the source said. Microsoft's MSN Direct Service, which will deliver information to the watches, will also be available at that time. Plans are priced at $9.95 per month or $59 per year while watches start at $129, Microsoft has said.
Microsoft's soon-to-be-released service pack for Windows XP will come with a major security-centric overhaul to the company's flagship Internet Explorer browser, including a new add-on management and crash detection tool and several modifications to the browser's default security settings.
According to a document spelling out the implications of the XP changes for developers, Microsoft said the browser will be updated dramatically in order to thwart malicious hacking attempts and to offer a more secure browsing experience.
A beta of Host Integration Server 2004 will be available Monday, Microsoft said. The software, geared at linking the Windows world with legacy systems, sports an updated Transaction Integrator (TI) with support for mainframe and AS/400 programs as well as XML Web services, said Paul Larsen, group program manager. The new "TI can extend mainframe and AS/400 programs as XML Web services. The TI designer runs in the Visual Studio shell and allows for Windows program to make calls as clients to mainframes as servers. The corollary is now it also supports host-initiated processing to allow mainframes and AS/400s to act as clients to Windows servers," Larsen said.
Microsoft plans to reorganize its Windows unit, creating a new division more tightly focused on the development of the core operating system.
The new division, dubbed the Windows Core division, will be headed by Brian Valentine, according to a source familiar with the company's plans. Valentine currently serves as senior VP of the Windows division.
The move to have a unit more tightly focused on development work comes as Microsoft is ramping up efforts around Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, which is expected to be released in late 2005 or 2006. Other software makers, including Oracle, have set up units focused on core technology in the past, leaving the work of creating specific products to separate teams.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is less than a month away, which means it's high time to make some predictions regarding what Chairman BillG & Co. are likely to pull out of their hats in Vegas.
We're betting we're going to hear plenty about seamless computing, albeit on the home side of the house. (Gates played up seamless computing among enterprises last month in Vegas at Comdex.)
In the not-too-distant future, according to Microsoft's vision, Windows devices running inside and outside the home (in your car, at work, on your wrist and on your cell phone/PDA) will all interoperate with your Windows gadgets inside the home without a hitch. (In the Microsoft world view, if you're not running Windows, connectivity can still happen, but not anywhere near as seamlessly.)
Japan's Toshiba and Denso, an advanced automotive systems supplier, said last week that they had jointly developed the world's first multi-OS environment for car navigation systems.
The environment provides single-chip support for Tron, a variant of the popular Japanese operating system for embedded devices, and Microsoft Windows Automotive, Microsoft's operating system for cars.
Toshiba and Denso said the environment allows concurrent use of Tron's advanced automotive systems and Microsoft's multimedia applications.
Digital music services provider Loudeye and Microsoft announced that they have teamed to promote Loudeye's new service that helps other companies set up online music stores much like Apple Computer's iTunes. Seattle-based Loudeye and the software giant said Monday that they will work together to handle the infrastructure and distribution for online music services branded by other companies that are looking to sell songs online or to enter the digital media business in some other way. Loudeye's digital music services, which include its Digital Music Store and iRadio Service that contains 100 preprogrammed music channels, are based on Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series technology.
Bill Gates is waging a revolution in global health. The goal: Break the developing world's cycle of sickness and poverty by eliminating the diseases that kill millions of children each year. There are early indications of success.
Gates, the world's richest man with the world's biggest philanthropic war chest at $24 billion, has made fighting disease in the developing world his top humanitarian priority.
The Seattle philanthropy spends about $800 million a year on global health -- nearly the same as the World Health Organization's annual budget and about as much as the U.S. Agency for International Development gave this year to fight AIDS and other diseases in developing countries.