Microsoft says that it is continuing to comply with the final judgement in the U.S. government's antitrust case against it, holding up as proof four new licensees of its Microsoft Communications Protocols Program (MCPP), which allows third-party products to interoperate with Windows clients.
The fact that Cisco Systems Inc., Tandberg Television Ltd., Laplink Software Inc., and The SCO Group Inc. have all executed licenses under the MCPP program in the last few months "attests to the reasonableness of the terms offered," Microsoft said in a court filing made Friday.
Project Green aims to bring enterprise applications, including Great Plains and Navision, into a single unified .NET architecture. Microsoft is working on its latest, best shot at the enterprise applications business with a new project to create a single, global code base for its product lines.
"Project Green" is the Redmond, Wash., company's effort to deliver all its business applications, from its Great Plains Software Inc., Navision A/S, Axapta (which Navision bought earlier) and Solomon Software (which Great Plains had acquired) lines, on a single code base built on the Microsoft Business Framework and .Net Framework. Revamped "Green" applications are planned to debut in the 2006 "Longhorn" time frame.
Sun Microsystems has watched its earnings tumble year over year for 10 consecutive quarters, and the company's financial picture is getting uglier these days. This week, Sun posted a $286 million loss on revenues of $2.54 billion, down 8 percent from the same quarter a year ago. The company also warned investors that its loss for the upcoming quarter will be far worse than previously expected. The news sent Sun's stock price tumbling to as low as $3.58. No matter how you feel about Sun, the company is in trouble. It sells an aging, expensive, proprietary version of UNIX that runs on aging, expensive, proprietary server hardware in an era when inexpensive Linux and Windows servers that run on commodity PC-based hardware offer similar or superior performance for far less money. The company has refused to change course or lay off workers, causing a Merrill Lynch analyst to publish a rare public letter to the company in which he blasted its management for not seeing the light.
Microsoft revealed today that subscribers of the upcoming MSN Premium 9 will get new antivirus and firewall features, courtesy of a licensing agreement with security firm McAfee Security. MSN Premium subscribers will receive McAfee VirusScan and McAfee Personal Firewall Plus desktop-protection products as part of their subscription, Microsoft says, whereas MSN Plus and MSN Dial-up subscribers will be able to access trial versions of the services and purchase them through the MSN site for a discounted price. MSN Premium, MSN Plus, and MSN Dial-up? Aren't all those choices a bit confusing? These new products will ship as part of MSN 9, due this winter. Seeing how consumers react to the multiple offerings should be interesting.
In the last two years, Microsoft has launched nearly a dozen products and poured billions into new technologies and markets but done little with its two big money-spinners, Windows and Office.
That will change next week when the world's largest software company begins selling the latest upgrade to Office, which promises tools to stop e-mail spam and allow companies to collaborate on documents, and research information from within applications and manage data over the Web.
A new survey has found that Microsoft is successfully penetrating the enterprise mindset. A Datamonitor survey of 200 large European enterprises has revealed the extent to which Microsoft has already penetrated the enterprise mindset. Though many still disparage Microsoft's pedigree in this space, the traditional heavyweights really should be worried.
When asked which vendors they would consider for integration projects, a surprisingly high number of the end-users recently surveyed by Datamonitor included Microsoft among their top three. A weighted average of their responses put Microsoft in the lead, just above IBM. The results really do highlight the efforts Microsoft has been making to enter, and compete effectively in, the enterprise market.
Yahoo's Overture Services subsidiary on Friday announced it will continue to offer commercial search links to Web rival MSN. Overture's paid search results will remain a part of MSN Search in the United States and the United Kingdom through June 2005, the company said. MSN has served as one of Overture's largest partners, contributing about a third of Overture's revenue this year.
The agreement is significant because it flies in the face of speculation that MSN would abandon this partnership for competitive reasons. Overture was recently acquired by Yahoo for $1.7 billion, putting Microsoft, which owns MSN, in an uncomfortable position with one of its biggest adversaries. The previous agreement between the companies allowed MSN to exit the relationship early in the event that Overture was acquired.
When Microsoft kicks off its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles Oct. 26th-30th, the event will in many ways mark a major shift in transparency about its core products, as well as a major victory for a subtle public relations build-up ahead of the event.
That's because when the software giant hands out DVDs and CDs containing pre-beta builds of core products -- its Windows operating system, SQL Server database and Visual Studio developer tools -- many if not most of the PDC attendees (the savvy ones at least) will already have a working knowledge of what to expect.
Just three days after a Microsoft vice president--who is in charge of Microsoft.com and Windows Update--told thousands of delegates at a conference in Florida that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP would be available by the end of 2003, the company has effectively retracted the comments and said that customers will see only a beta version of SP2 this year.
Richard Kaplan, vice president of content and delivery at Microsoft, made the statement during a talk to an audience of around 2,000 people at the Citrix iForum conference earlier this week, in which he explained why he believed that Windows Server 2003 was the best and fastest platform for Citrix MetaFrame users.
In an exclusive Face to Face interview, Unisys Chairman and CEO Larry Weinbach tells ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about how he has moved the company away from selling mainframes and PCs and put the emphasis on high-end multiprocessor Windows servers. Weinbach talks about his big bet on Windows in the data center, scaling up versus scaling out server architectures and the current climate for information technology spending.