Dell Computer has big plans for little laptops. The PC maker next week will launch a new "ultra-portable" laptop that weighs 3.6 pounds but packs the same features, including fast processors and built-in wireless connectivity, available in 8-pound monsters.
The new laptop, Dell's Latitude C400, pairs relatively low weight with a 12.1-inch screen, built-in wireless connectivity and Pentium III-M chips at speeds up to 1.2GHz--the fastest mobile chips currently available from Intel. Ultraportables generally weigh in at 3.5 to 4 pounds but are sometimes seen as being compromised because the smaller size dictates the use of a slower processor, and battery life is shorter than in larger machines.
They just can't rid themselves of that original "now you're flying" theme for XP advertising, even though it was dropped in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Microsoft announced this week that Windows XP was "flying off the shelves," a reference to the product's TV ads, in which people are flying overhead while people work and play on XP machines. What's weird is that we're not hearing any concrete numbers yet: The company mentions only that XP sales are "exceeding initial sales of Windows 95 and Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me) and keeping pace with initial sales of Windows 98." Others have more concrete data: According to sales tracking firm NPD Intelect, XP sold 300,000 units at retail in three days. This compares to 400,000 units for Windows 98 and 200,000 units for Windows Me. I found another interesting statistic we can compare XP to at the end of the year: An October 17, 1995 press release for Windows 95 noted that that product had sold over 7 million copies at retail and with new PCs within two months of its launch.
Can technology aficionados forget about security concerns, the slumping economy and their own job insecurity for a few days to focus on the latest advances in wireless networking and digital cameras? That's the key question for the scores of vendors who will be hawking their latest gadgets to shell-shocked visitors at the Comdex Fall 2001 show in Las Vegas next week. Although many other conferences have been canceled or postponed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a slimmer and more security-conscious Comdex is proceeding as planned. Some 150,000 attendees are expected this year, down about 25 percent from last year, and fewer major product announcements are planned.
As Microsoft promised in late August, the company is now offering Additional Licenses for Windows XP, although at only a slight discount off the retail price. Shortly before releasing XP to manufacturing, Microsoft decided to offer families a way to purchase additional copies of XP through a new licensing program, originally called Additional Family Licenses. The license lets consumers use their existing XP retail CD-ROMs to install XP on a second machine by providing a new Product Key.
"Additional licenses for Windows XP are now available at shop.microsoft.com," said Kristian Gyorkos, product manager for Windows XP. "As of [Wednesday], additional licenses [were] available through the retail channel as well."
Antitrust enforcers in the nine states that rejected the settlement with Microsoft Corp. say they will have enough money for a sustained courtroom fight without the resources of the Justice Department and other former partners in the case. "I'm confident the resources will be available to continue our prosecution of this case as effectively as in the past,'' Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Wednesday. A spokesman for Iowa's attorney general said officials there also were confident of "ample resources for this ongoing litigation.''
Since its retail debut Oct. 25, Microsoft Corp.'s newest operating system, Windows XP, is achieving high demand worldwide. So high that some retailers are having trouble keeping store shelves stocked with Windows XP. Growing consumer demand for Windows XP has led to sales that are exceeding initial sales of Windows 95 and Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me) and keeping pace with initial sales of Windows 98.
"We are extremely pleased with the enthusiastic response from our customers," said Chris Jones, vice president for Windows at Microsoft. "We see Windows XP as being a positive catalyst for a great holiday season for the entire PC industry."
Charter Communications Inc. today announced the selection of the Microsoft TV software platform to deploy the next generation of interactive TV services to 1 million of its customers over the next seven years. The agreement illustrates Charter's continuing commitment to bring customers interactive TV services and broadband value. "Charter and Microsoft are working together to deploy this next-generation service that offers consumers an advanced platform to seamlessly access interactive information and entertainment through the television," said Steve Silva, executive vice president and chief technical officer for Charter. "Using a DOCSIS modem integrated into a digital set-top receiver, we will be the first to deliver an interactive TV service that incorporates Internet-based streaming audio and video and Flash animation. This agreement brings together the strength and reach of Charter's broadband network -- a delivery mechanism unmatched for its speed and capacity -- with the technology expertise of Microsoft, the recognized leader in software development."
Microsoft wants to make the world safe for .Net. That's the major theme here at the software giant's Trusted Computing conference, where the company has brought together almost 200 security experts, privacy advocates and policy-makers in hopes of developing a firm strategy to better secure the Internet. "The Internet is clearly at the stage where the telephone was when we had just switched from rotary dialing," Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer for advanced strategies, said during a Tuesday keynote address. Like the poor security that originally surrounded tone dialing and let hackers misuse the phone network, poor security on the Internet today allows online vandals, hackers and others free reign, Mundie said. "We have been a bit naive about the threats that are out there."
With almost 50,000 employees and a slew of divisions, it's impossible for a senior management team, no matter how smart and focused, to direct every day-to-day product feature decision. To fully understand how certain decisions have been made in any company, one must look at all the internal organizational factors as well as those of the outside world. It's infinitely easier to fit a conspiracy onto a large organization from the outside than it is to run a coordinated conspiracy from the inside. Microsoft is not invulnerable to market forces. Intuit has done a great job of keeping Microsoft Money at bay. Today, Internet-based applications and the increasing concentration on building browser-centric user interfaces represent a dramatic threat to Microsoft's desktop business. The more companies build applications based on a hosted model, the more opportunities exist for other data-center infrastructure players.
Maybe you think that all programmers care about is Mountain Dew and a fast network connection. But we want to be treated right. And nobody knows how to treat a programmer right like Microsoft. Being in the operating systems business has given Microsoft a head start with any development tools for those operating systems. The universality of the World Wide Web has made it easier for others to provide developer information about Windows, but it has also made it easier for people to get information from Microsoft. If you want to see why most programmers are so happy with Microsoft, look no further than the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) Web site. Why should you go any further when Microsoft is the obvious, definitive source for such information?