Microsoft said senior vice president Richard Emerson, who oversaw acquisitions and investments, has left the company. Emerson left Aug. 30, said Rachel Wayne, a spokeswoman for Microsoft at the Waggener Edstrom public-relations company.
Microsoft hired him in November 2000 from Lazard Freres & Co., where he was co-head of technology and telecommunications advisory services. Microsoft has acquired small-business software makers Great Plains Software Inc. and Navision A/S, and game developer Rare Ltd. in the past three years.
Microsoft has never bought a company valued at more than $1.5 billion and has slowed the pace of investments after writing down billions of dollars since 2001.
According to a study that Celent Communications published last week, most ATMs in the United States will be running a Windows OS by 2005, a scary proposition for anyone who's seen the Blue Screen of Death or other crashes while doing such innocuous things as copying a file or printing. But, hey, I'm sure Windows is up to the task of accurately dispensing money and properly debiting my checking account. Apparently, the banking industry is finally getting ready to dump the aging and rarely updated IBM OS/2, which is the most common ATM OS these days, and move to Windows, which is more compatible with the networks that banks now use. I see absolutely no problem with this. Ahem.
Microsoft's forthcoming Office 2003 suite offers enterprises a promise few vendors or analysts are willing to support. The software giant argues that organizations will realize significant business process improvements by using the Office 2003 suite as a window into back-end enterprise systems. Office 2003's support for XML, Microsoft contends, is the key to bridging this front-end to back-end gap.
Currently available to volume buyers and due for official launch on Oct. 21, Office 2003 gives an employee using Outlook the ability to access data stored in a CRM system or to use Excel to get to an accounting system, for example.
Talk on the campaign trail can get pretty rough, especially when the debate pits open source against Microsoft software. But now, Microsoft says, the gloves are back on, though the company has pledged to take the invective out of its talking points about Linux and open-source software.
Instead, Microsoft representatives plan to debate the relative merits of Windows and open-source software such as Linux using facts instead of emotionally charged statements. That's according to Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy who was appointed in July. It's Taylor's job to direct Microsoft's thinking about open-source products. "It is not a religious discussion; it is a business model discussion," Taylor says. "We kind of defaulted (to emotion in the past) because we could not think about Linux in the right way."
Forbes magazine released its list of the 400 wealthiest U.S. citizens Thursday, revealing that once again Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has not only grabbed the top spot but is the world's richest man with a net worth of $46 billion.
Shaking off a macroeconomic slowdown, the war in Iraq and legal scrutiny of his software empire, Gates managed to increase his personal fortune by $3 billion over his net worth of $43 billion on the 2002 list.
Microsoft executives still made a strong showing on the Forbes list, with Microsoft cofounder Paul Gardner Allen keeping hold of the number-three spot, with a net worth of $22 billion. The Washington State University drop-out managed to increase his personal fortune by $1 billion over last year.
Microsoft's top executives all saw slight increases in salary and bonus last year, according to the company's annual proxy statement, filed Thursday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates each received $551,667 in pay and $313,447 in bonus last year, up from $547,500 in salary and $205,810 in bonus a year ago. Jim Allchin, who heads Microsoft's Windows operating system business, received $505,624 in salary and $400,000 in bonus, up from $495,195 and $400,000, respectively, in 2002. Jeff Raikes, who heads the Microsoft Office unit, earned $524,309 in salary and $300,000 in bonus, up from $495,083 and $250,000 a year ago.
A new mass-mailing virus is on the loose on the Internet, this one masquerading as a message from Microsoft about a cumulative security patch. Known as either Swen or Gibe, the virus is mainly found in Europe right now, but anti-virus experts say it has the potential to spread quickly and widely.
Like some other recent worms and viruses, Swen attempts to spread through several different methods, including peer-to-peer file sharing networks and IRC channels. It takes advantage of a two-year-old flaw in Microsoft Outlook and is capable of automatically executing the infected attachment once the message is opened.
AMD plans to offer what it calls mid- and low-power AMD Opteron processors in 2004, the company announced this week. The 64-bit Opteron processors, which differ from Intel's Itanium processor in that they use the x86 instruction set, will be available at 55 watts and 30 watts. They will be offered across the Opteron product line in the 100, 200 and 800 series.
Intel last week began shipping its first low-power, 64-bit Itanium processor, code-named Deerfield, which consumes 62 watts. That processor, which runs at 1 GHz with 1.5 MB of L3 cache, uses about half the power of other current Itanium 2 chips.
Microsoft MapPoint 2004 entered general availability on Thursday. The updated release of Microsoft's business mapping software brings expanded demographic data, more map coverage and better support for mobile users. The stand-alone application is billed as complementary to the Office suite and is designed to swap data with Office applications, as well as with COM-based and .NET-based applications. Microsoft simultaneously launched the North American and European editions of MapPoint 2004 on Thursday. The U.S. estimated retail price is about $300.
With fears of 64-bit AMD-based gaming PCs obviously driving it on, Intel this week announced the previously unexpected Pentium 4 Extreme Edition microprocessor, which the company says will usher in a new era of high performance online gaming. The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition runs at 3.2 GHz and features a whopping 2 MB of L3 cache in addition to the standard 512 KB of L2 cache featured in standard Pentium 4 CPUs. And like other 3.2 GHz Pentium 4's, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition features Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology, which lets the CPU divide tasks between different software jobs more efficiently, often giving the performance of dual processors.