When the Department of Justice hauled Microsoft into court on antitrust charges in 1998, Silicon Valley was awash in schadenfreude. For years, Microsoft's Windows desktop monopoly had inspired equal doses of fear and distrust. It was time for payback, courtesy of Uncle Sam and your hard-earned taxpayer dollars at work. But all it took was a heretofore obscure patent to ignite a controversy to turn Microsoft into the people's choice.
But as computer industry executives pondered the business ramifications of the Eolas verdict, they began to get a cold sweat over the prospect of millions of Web pages--as well as products of independent software developers--winding up being incompatible with Microsoft's Internet browser.
Microsoft, seeking a foothold in the Internet search business, approached Google within the last two months to discuss a partnership or even a merger, The New York Times said on Friday. Microsoft may still be interested in pursuing the Web search company at a later date, the report said, citing an executive briefed on the discussion, though its recent advances gained little traction. The report, quoting company executives and others briefed on the discussions, said Google indicated it was more interested in pursuing an initial public offering.
This week Microsoft executives opened the door to a possible shift in that strategy at least with respect to Kodiak, the next-generation Exchange Server. While the plan remains to put Kodiak on the WinFS relational store, business pressures could abrogate that decision, the executives conceded.
While WinFS will incorporate relational technology from the SQL Server world, it must be much simpler, and quality and timing must be right for it to make it into the new Kodiak messaging release. "If we cannot provide that, then the Exchange team has a business to run," said Gordon Mangione, Microsoft's vice president of SQL Server.
Longhorn's major themes are strengthening operating system fundamentals, overhauling the presentation layer, building in radical enhancements to the file system and embracing Web services in internal and external communications.
A widely circulated chart at the PDC lays out these pillars in large blocks with their associated code-names. Fundamentals, a.k.a. Base OS Services, lies at the bottom of the chart, supporting all the other enhancements. Resting on top of Fundamentals are three equal-size blocks: "Avalon" for the presentation layer, "WinFS" for storage and "Indigo" for communication. Atop the whole structure is WinFX, which Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin describes as "the step beyond Win32" programming.
Microsoft spent the past week touting the new graphics, storage and communications features to come in the next Windows. But the product's fate in the marketplace may ultimately depend on something much less glamorous.
The company, plagued in recent years by viruses that infiltrate flaws in Windows, is promising fewer bugs and new levels of security in Longhorn, the next generation of the operating system, unveiled publicly at a Microsoft conference here this week.
As has been the case at every Microsoft event this year, executives at the software giant updated the company's product roadmap at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003 in Los Angeles. First, Longhorn Beta 1 will ship in late summer 2004, possibly right around the time of next year's PDC (not a given, but that my guess); no executives from the company said anything about Beta 2 or the final release date, so don't believe any of the 2006 rumors, at least not yet. XP SP2, as mentioned previously, will be ordered in the first half of 2004. Windows Server 2003 SP1 will be delivered sometime after XP SP2, in the second half of 2004; AMD-64 versions of Windows 2003 will ship at the same time as SP1. A new version of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, codenamed "Lonestar," will ship in the first half of 2004. SQL Server "Yukon" will ship in the second half of 2004, after a widespread Beta 2 release in the first half of the year. Somewhat tied to Yukon is Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey," which will follow a similar trajectory.
Looking to boost the management of Web services on the Microsoft .Net platform, Computer Associates plans to link its upcoming Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) software to the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 systems management platform. Announced this week, the integration will be enabled via the Unicenter Web Services Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager, due to ship in early-2004. WSDM is planned for general release by the end of this year. The management pack will become part of WSDM.
Microsoft plans to publicly release a threat modeling tool it uses internally to help software developers create more secure software, the company said Thursday. The tool can display threats in a diagram after information such as usage scenarios and the environment in which the application will run is entered, Michael Howard, senior program manager for security engineering and communications at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the vendor's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.
The Redmond, Washington, software maker appears to be making a practice of publicly releasing tools it uses in house. The company is also releasing Prefix, which features a toolkit to analyze source text for common errors, and Prefast, an analysis tool for source text.
Software developers are in the crosshairs of Microsoft's "Watson" initiative, now that the company is claiming success with the automated customer feedback program in improving the quality of its own software and third-party hardware drivers.
Watson is the initiative behind the pop-up windows that appear and offer to send an error report to Microsoft every time an application crashes on Windows XP. Microsoft claims the initiative has allowed it to focus its attention on fixing the bugs in its own software that cause the highest percentage of systems crashes.
Microsoft's pre-beta version of its Visual Studio .NET platform, "Whidbey", is offering a trove of new simplified tools and features that should make developers jobs easier, while giving Microsoft critics new fodder, attendees at the Professional Developers Conference here said.
The new Whidbey features, many of which extend support for other development languages such as C++, are designed to help developers continue pushing Web services out to their end-users by writing in managed code of the .NET platform.