As of August 31 of this year, Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" technology -- once codenamed Janus -- will no longer play for sure -- unless, that is, users play back the tunes on the same computers and OS forever. In a move that's come under concerted attack by users ranging from anti-DRM music bloggers to Linux fans, Microsoft has disclosed plans to stop providing authorization keys for songs downloaded from the old MSN Music service.
In an e-mail Tuesday, Microsoft told customers of the former MSN Music -- which was shut down and replaced by Zune Markeplace in 2006 -- that as of August 31, 2008 support will stop for "the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased on MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers.
One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child's president was publicly revealed, the educational project's founder and chairman says the group's XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as the operating system, with open source educational apps such as its home-built Sugar running on top.
OLPC's founder Nicholas Negroponte also told the Associated Press on Tuesday that an insistence upon using only free, open source software had hampered the XO's usability and scared away potential adopters.
Microsoft rolled out its Dynamics CRM Online platform today as a generally available service. The rollout represents a challenge to Salesforce.com's hosted customer relationship management offerings. It also represents a milestone in Microsoft's general "software plus services" strategy.
Under the company's software plus services approach, Microsoft is offering hosted solutions that are delivered to the customer over the Internet, plus traditionally delivered software that is installed and customized behind the firewall at the customer's premises.
Microsoft is targeting system management as a way to differentiate itself from competitors in the virtualization market, the
company said Tuesday.
Anticipating that the market for virtualization software, such as Microsoft's Hyper-V, eventually will be commoditized, the
company sees management as the key revenue opportunity for competitors offering server virtualization, said Windows Enterprise
and Management Division General Manager Larry Orecklin, speaking to reporters on Microsoft's campus Tuesday.
Microsoft will soon detail ways that partner companies will be able to deliver their services based on Microsoft's hosted
services, the software company said on Tuesday.
When Microsoft earlier this year announced that it will host its Exchange and SharePoint software for businesses of any size, some third-party software providers wondered about their futures. Companies that offer software that runs on SharePoint,
for example, were worried that they wouldn't be able to offer products to customers of Microsoft's hosted service.
Microsoft is rewriting many of its applications to offer them in a hosted fashion, an executive said on Tuesday.
In order to efficiently host applications for customers, Microsoft must support multitenancy, which means that a hosted service
provider can run one instance of the software, managing it as a single entity even though it serves multiple customers.
"One big fallacy is that you can take an application architected for one-to-few delivery and call it one-to-many," said Tim
O'Brien, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft, speaking to reporters at the software maker's headquarters in
Redmond, Wash.
Microsoft took credit for crushing the Storm botnet Tuesday, saying that the malware search-and-destroy tool it distributes
to Windows users disinfected so many bots that the hackers threw in the towel.
"They realized they were in our gun sights," said Jimmy Kuo, a principal architect with Microsoft's malware protection center, the group responsible for the MRST (Malicious Software
Removal Tool). Microsoft updates and automatically re-distributes the software tool to Windows users each month on Patch Tuesday.
Looking to broaden the reach of high performance .NET applications across multiple clustered tiers and platforms, as well as promote the use of Windows Communications Foundation, Microsoft this week will release a sample application, tutorials and benchmarks to help simplify the development and deployment of service-oriented architecture composite apps.
Microsoft's .NET StockTrader 2.0 with Configuration Service 2.0 will providean early -- though narrow -- glimpse of the work coming out of the company's Oslo initiative, Redmond's next-generation model-driven SOA platform. Officials were quick to warn that Configuration Service 2.0 is not a community technology preview of Oslo, but did say that work from it could find its way into the eventual CTP.
In a repeat of a February donnybrook over SP1 for Windows Vista, IT professionals and developers are blasting Microsoft's decision to withhold the final version of Windows XP SP3 from them until after it's released to the public.
Subscribers to TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network, who pay hundreds annually to the Microsoft for the right to
download software for testing and development purposes, called the move a "farce," a "slap in the face" and "ludicrous."
China isn't particularly well-known for paying for software--heck, it's the number one consumer of pirated software worldwide--but Microsoft and Novell are trying to change that. The companies announced an allegiance Sunday in which they will attempt to convert business users of free Linux versions in China and other markets to paid copies of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The big question here, of course, is why Microsoft would be promoting Linux at all. The company says it is simply being pragmatic.