Microsoft on Monday announced a new holiday package for its Xbox video game console, dimming expectations for another price cut this year. The new bundle packages an Xbox console with two games--LucasArt's "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and THQ's "Tetris Worlds Live"--and a two-month trial subscription to Xbox Live, the online service for the console. The package will sell for $180, the Xbox price Microsoft set in May to match price moves by competitor Sony for its PlayStation 2 console.
Many analysts had expected another round of price cuts late this year, in the wake of slowing overall sales for the video game market.
All 18 of Microsoft's Large Account Resellers (LARs) have undergone a compulsory audit process to ensure they are up to scratch. The audit took two months to compile and involved LARs answering 102 questions about business processes and systems.
Edward Hyde, channel and licensing sales manager at Microsoft, said: "We really wanted to spend time working with each LAR and making sure the processes with which they transact Select and Enterprise agreements with customers were of the highest standards.
Microsoft has reached a deal that will, for the first time, put a version of its Windows operating system in mobile phones available in North America. The agreement with wireless provider AT&T Wireless and handset maker Motorola, to be announced today, represents a breakthrough in Microsoft's efforts to crack the U.S. market for smart phones, wireless devices with added features such as e-mail, instant-messaging and a Web browser.
The phone that's part of the deal, a Motorola MPx200, is expected to be made available to AT&T Wireless customers in the fourth quarter of this year. Smart phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software have previously been available only overseas.
Microsoft this week will unveil Office Live Meeting, the first service offered as part of its Office productivity suite. Although the first version will pepper only a few enhancements above the service Microsoft acquired from PlaceWare earlier this year, the move signals Microsoft's long-term aspiration to bring online meetings into the enterprise collaboration platform fold.
As a hosted service, Live Meeting will continue the PlaceWare legacy, competing against market leader WebEx and a host of other players. In this initial incarnation, Live Meeting has not yet been integrated into Office and as such will not immediately alter enterprise decision-making for Web conferencing, according to analyst Mike Gotta, senior vice president of Meta Group.
These screenshots are from Windows Longhorn build 4029 and are over a month old at this point. I didn't take these myself, and I'm told they leaked to the Web, with annotations, a while back. But these are the originals, and thanks to 1nfin!ty for sending them along.
So what's new in this build? We can see the same Plex visual style as previous builds, a new design for the sidebar clock, an interesting blend of Aero- and XP-style toolbars, hover-triggered image preview, new WinFS-based visual query filtering, batch image processing, and more.
I'm puzzled by Microsoft's apparent confusion over the release date for Longhorn. Many stories over the last two weeks have discussed potential repercussions and conspiracy theories. The leading one being that they want to wait until the anti-trust consent order runs out so they can keep the document apis secret. I don't buy that at all.
Besides being inconsistent with the way MS operates, it would be bad business. And whatever you want to say about the guys and gals in Redmond, stupid they are not. Someone also floated the theory last week that the delay was due to Intel's so far inability to produce a DX9 compatible chipset. But that seems even more far-fetched to me. Since when did MS delay a critical release for Intel? By the time Longhorn hits the market, DX9 parts will be everywhere. Intel's ability to play ball is Intel's problem.
Intel rolled out two new Itanium 2 processors this week that will help drive down the cost of 64-bit computing systems. Both processors are optimized for dual-processor servers and workstations, and one of the chips, previously code-named "Deerfield" has lower power requirements.
The new processors are a 1.4-GHz processor with 1.5 MB of L3 cache priced at $1,172 each in 1,0000-unit quantities and a 1-GHz processor with 1.5 MB of L3 cache priced at $744. The six current Itanium versions are priced between $4,227 and $1,338 in 1,000-unit quantities.
According to MSRC security program manager Stephen Toulouse, the first step in the security response process is the point at which Microsoft is made aware of a vulnerability. "We receive vulnerability reports through a variety of channels," said Toulouse. In some cases, the MSRC is notified by security researchers and others through a widely publicized e-mail address. Some researchers have a direct line to a specific member of the MRSC team. Researchers are not compensated for their efforts, according to Toulouse. In addition to the researchers in the security community, Microsoft also has teams internally that find and report vulnerabilities to the MSRC.
Ditto has send us a great looking screenshots of MSN beta. With no further delay...
After making a point that advanced features within the Windows Media 9 Series digital media platform would only be available on its flagship Windows platform, Microsoft did a sudden about-turn this week, announcing that a new version of the Windows Media Player (WMP) for the Mac OS X would be released in the fall.
While a version of WMP has always been available for Mac users, DRM capabilities have been somewhat limited and the word is the new WMP for Mac OS X will support full playback of WM9 Series encoded content, including Windows Media DRM versions 7.x through 9.
