WinInsider

Speech recognition, one of the computing world's long-deferred dreams, will be highlighted in separate initiatives from Microsoft and IBM next week. On Monday, Microsoft, along with representatives from Cisco Systems, Intel, Philips and SpeechWorks, will hold a press conference at its Mountain View, Calif., offices. The companies will announce a collaborative effort to lay the groundwork for accessing the Web through voice commands, according to a statement from Microsoft. The idea behind the effort is to come up with practical ways to "provide consumers with multiple means of accessing information anytime, anywhere over a number of different devices--including PCs, wireless (handhelds), mobile phones and telephones--over diverse networks," according to Microsoft.

Following the release of the gold code WinXP Microsoft has decided to update the HCL list for it too. Throughout the beta-cycle may components were listed but did not actually work. This has been fixed now so that customers may accurately determine if their hardware will function on Windows XP Pro or Home Editions. If you are planning to upgrade or buy components that you will use with Windows XP, Neowin.net recommendation is that you first browse through the HCL to make sure that the components are supported thus saving you headaches later.

The government and Microsoft have failed to settle their landmark antitrust case before the first deadline imposed by a federal judge, sources said Friday. The two sides also appear to have been unable to agree on a mediator for the remaining discussions, indicating that a deep gulf of differences could separate the parties. Lawyers representing Microsoft, the Justice Department and 18 states delivered the news in a conference call Friday with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, said sources familiar with the call. If the parties did not submit a mediator for the judge's approval, she could assign one or allow the process to continue without third-party oversight.

Today marks the day that Microsoft and the DOJ will need to have a mediator assigned should they be unable to reach a settlement in Microsoft's years-old antitrust case. And since the chance of a settlement is hovering between zero and some negative number, I think we can expect a mediator announcement later today. Mediation in early 2000 didn't exactly reap any rewards either, however, so it's likely that Microsoft will eventually find itself at the mercy of the court. And I don't think the word mercy is going to be part of the remedy decision at that point.

From WinInfo Short Takes: Week of October 15

Emachines is offering Windows XP on the cheap, with Friday's introduction of new desktop PCs. The budget-minded personal computer maker is offering four new desktops with Microsoft's operating system pre-loaded and with a starting price of $474 before a $75 rebate. The company is betting that the combination of Windows XP and a low price will help persuade consumers to upgrade. Microsoft's new operating system is set to launch Oct. 25, but PC makers have been offering systems with Windows XP pre-loaded since late last month.

U.S. software giant Microsoft unveiled Friday an extended alliance with Japanese game developer Sega ahead of the U.S. company's closely awaited launch of its game console Xbox later this year. The Xbox represents Microsoft's push into the $20 billion video game industry now dominated by Japan's Sony and Nintendo, which also are marketing advanced 128-bit game consoles. Under the agreement, Sega will provide new games in its hit Shenmue series exclusively for the Xbox in the North American market and it will make new games in its popular Fantasy Star Online series for the Xbox.

To start building buzz, a 15-second prime time television "teaser" will debut on Monday Night Football on Oct. 15, said Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft's PC experience marketing director. That will be followed with longer 60-second and 30-second ads on Oct. 18 showing people soaring over fields and through offices, in what is an echo of the abandoned flying theme. The spots, which will also hit cable and late-night time slots, show off Windows XP features like digital music, videoconferencing and video editing. And the new Windows theme music? Observers have wondered what song Microsoft would pick to promote Windows XP after the company paid millions of dollars to The Rolling Stones for use of their hit "Start Me Up" in Windows 95 ads.

Microsoft released a Web traffic report Thursday that showed its MSN site beating rival Yahoo in the contest for top search engine, a ranking that was immediately disputed by the Web portal. The software giant said MSN Search had more than 32 million unique users in the United States, compared to Yahoo Search's 29 million users. Yahoo, however, refutes the claim, saying the numbers come from a custom report the software giant asked a third-party research firm to create. Yahoo said a lot of MSN Search queries are "involuntary." Those searches are prompted by people who typed a misspelled or nonexistent domain name into the address bar of Internet Explorer and were automatically redirected to Microsoft's search engine, a feature the software giant quietly added to its browser in September.

Intel won't release another version of the Pentium 4 until early 2002, sources say, in a move that will likely put the performance crown back on Advanced Micro Devices' head--at least for a short time. "Northwood," a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 based on the 130-nanometer (0.13-micron) manufacturing process, will come out commercially in the first part of 2002, sources said Thursday. Earlier, sources speculated that the chip would debut in late 2001.

Besides running at 2.2GHz, the chip will contain a secondary cache with 512KB of memory, which also will boost performance. Secondary cache sits next to the processor and delivers oft-accessed data. Current Pentium 4 chips contain a 256KB cache.

Microsoft Corp. is building new Web-services middleware meant to take the Microsoft .Net platform to the next level. But the crux of that services infrastructure, code-named Indigo, is still two years away from delivery. Indigo, according to sources recently briefed by Microsoft, is the middleware that will pro-vide some of the high-availability, distributed features that users and businesses will require in or-der to make Web services truly ubiquitous. Microsoft is laboring to make its first software developer release of Indigo available to key partners by the third week of October, around the time of its annual Professional Developers Con-ference in Los Angeles, sources said. Microsoft is planning to build Indigo into a future version of Windows, possibly the release code-named Longhorn, by the spring of 2003, said sources.