There are no checkered flags, no exhaust fumes and no shirtless fans holding cans of Budweiser at the races where Microsoft proves the mettle of its industrial-strength software - only a roomful of humming computers. But the Redmond company and its rivals treat these competitions, called benchmark tests, just as seriously as Ford does stock-car races. "If you're in, you're in to win," said Paul Flessner, the senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's enterprise-server business.
So far, Microsoft has won most of the categories it has entered, helping the company prove that its software is powerful enough to run network servers as well as personal computers. With the prize being a bigger share of the $60 billion server market, Microsoft aims to use benchmarks in the coming year to show that its software can run larger and larger networks - and perhaps win customers from rivals such as Oracle, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
If there is a key to Michael Dell's success, it is his ability to make the right decision at the right time--and often, that decision is to do nothing at all. He did not join the rush to make handheld devices. He did not open stores as Gateway and Apple Computer did. He did experiment briefly with a stylishly designed PC but axed the product six months after putting it on the market.
"Customers have the best ability to determine which products and services are valid," said the 36-year-old CEO of Dell Computer. "It's not so much people in laboratories. That's actually proven to be a pretty bad way of coming up with products. There's a lot of technology in search of a problem."
This article was published on ZDNet, to my astonishment this article is actually good.
When I heard the news that AOL Time Warner (my employer) filed a lawsuit last Tuesday against Microsoft, I was not surprised -- just disappointed. AOL's civil suit accuses Microsoft of using its Windows software, which has long been bundled in its Internet Explorer browser, to crush Netscape, which has a competing browser and is owned by AOL.
Netscape's browser used to be light and zippy, but now it's heavy and sluggish. The current version on my computer, Netscape 6.2e (an enterprise version not markedly different than the consumer one), takes up five times as much memory as Internet Explorer does. Hell, it even takes up more memory than my operating system. Needless to say, it also crashes frequently. Netscape is so bad that I would no longer use it, except that as an AOL employee, I'm forced to. The company recently switched its corporate e-mail to Netscape Mail, which can be used only with the Netscape browser.
(Incidentally, don't even get me started on the wonders of Netscape Mail. Suffice it to say that its primitive features and extremely buggy nature make it seem like a throwback to e-mail systems circa 1995.)
Microsoft on Monday released Personal Collection 2002, an enhancement pack for Microsoft Office 97, 2000 and XP. The $55 collection includes 2002 versions of four programs typically sold separately: Personal Portfolio, Encarta Encyclopedia, Money and Picture It Photo. Portfolio offers 600 templates for use with Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook or PowerPoint. Encarta and Money are basic, or standard, versions that lack some of the more robust features of their "deluxe" counterparts. Still, the standard versions of Encarta and Money combined sell for about the same price as the whole package, making Personal Collection a potential value for consumers looking for at least three of the programs.
AOL Time Warner and Microsoft on Monday resolved their differences over which documents will be released as part of the ongoing litigation in the software giant's antitrust trial. On Wednesday, Microsoft filed a brief with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asserting that AOL Time Warner had not released all of the documents requested as part of a discovery process. AOL Time Warner charged that Microsoft filed its Wednesday brief in response to a different lawsuit that Netscape Communications--a unit of AOL--had filed the previous day.
In a Monday letter to Kollar-Kotelly, AOL lawyers wrote that "AOL and Microsoft are pleased to inform the court that they have resolved their differences regarding the outstanding discovery disputes that were the subject of Microsoft's motion to compel. That motion is therefore withdrawn." Microsoft lawyers sent a separate letter stating basically the same information.
Sources close to Microsoft confirm that The Beast is set to include a new relational file store at the core of its next version of Windows. Some roadmap slippage has apparently occurred, too, as the database core will be introduced into Longhorn, and Blackcomb has been pushed further back. That leaves a gap for a point revision of XP next year, although there's no sign of this on the roadmap just yet. Despite the annual revisions being named as users' number one bugbear, Microsoft hasn't let a year go by without releasing a new version of Windows since 1997, when it was fighting the browser wars.
Next generation Windows Media Technologies are coming in 2002. Microsoft introduced "Corona," its next generation of Windows Media technologies, at the Streaming Media East 2001 conference in New York, but because of the surprise early birth of my second child, Kelly, I wasn't able to attend. So I got a Corona demonstration a month later at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and came away impressed. Here's what I found out.
Thanks to ActiveWin for this link.
The richest people on earth have created a fund of more than $24 billion to save the poorest from disease. How much of a difference can Bill and Melinda Gates make? To a man like Gates, this is not just an outrage but an opportunity-one he is uniquely positioned to seize. Over the past several years, Gates and his wife, Melinda, have created what is now the largest foundation in history. Its assets stand at more than $24 billion. And though it supports some programs to improve schools and wire libraries to the Internet, its primary focus is health. Nothing about the foundation is conventional. Instead of turning it over to a board of directors, Gates placed his dad and a longtime friend in charge. And applying his legendary business sense to the enterprise, he has helped create a whole new model of philanthropy-a spare, lean, entrepreneurial model that employs leverage instead of largesse to make things happen.
Intel is reportedly working on a long-rumored project to develop an emergency backup plan for the high-end server market in the event its Itanium processor fails to take off. The company is looking at building capabilities into the next version of the Pentium family, code-named Prescott, that will allow the chip to run 32-bit applications, the same sort of applications that currently run on Windows machines, as well as 64-bit versions of those applications, according to a report in The San Jose Mercury News. Sixty-four bits is the amount of data the chip can process during one clock cycle. Overall, 64-bit chips can greatly improve performance and are necessary for applications such as data mining.
It's easy to be seduced by the awesome possibilites of taking pictures with a digital camera. Think back to the first time you saw someone showing off with a digital camera. Remember how surprised you were on realising that there's no film needed, and you can see the picture instantly? That was probably when you decided that your life would be incomplete without one....