Companies should think twice about skipping Windows Vista and should get started sooner rather than later on updating their client desktops to the latest Microsoft operating system, according to an independent report issued by Forrester Research.
The report, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," says there are a number of reasons to upgrade now, even if avoiding Vista to wait for Windows 7 may seem like a viable
option. The company has issued a second report, "Lessons Learned from Early Adopters of Windows Vista," to show how some users have handled migrations.
Microsoft this week issued a report analyzing the vulnerability disclosures and security updates for Windows Vista's first year on the market, comparing this information to similar first-year data for its predecessor, Windows XP, and contemporary competition such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and Apple Mac OS X.
Not surprisingly, given the deep security improvements that the company made to Vista, Microsoft's latest OS came out well ahead of the other systems.
All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley reported Monday that William Poole, one of the Windows executives who oversaw the development of Vista, has left the company.
Poole's most recent position at Microsoft was a co-corporate vice president for Unlimited Potential, a division of Microsoft focused on promoting technology and computer skills in emerging markets, but prior to that he was a senior vice president for the Windows Client division when the company was developing Vista.
Looking to take on Google News, the Redmond company on Tuesday silently launched its own news aggregator. While Live Search News looks much more basic than what Google currently offers, it's a start. The layout of the new Live Search News is somewhat similar to Google News, but also may remind some of Techmeme, another aggregator. Sections are listed across the top, with news headlines listed down the left column. Users are able to drill down from the major headlines by clicking "more on this story," which returns news articles having to do with the topic of the headline article.
According to a story in "The Wall Street Journal," Microsoft will increase the amount of money it lends to small businesses seeking to license its software in a bid to jumpstart sales during the current economic slowdown. The software giant will increase its small business loans by 60 percent this year, to $1.25 billion. Last year, Microsoft provided $780 million in financing to small businesses.
Microsoft's small business financing program is one of the under-appreciated aspects of the software giant's business, and the company says that propping up sales now is important since small businesses are having trouble getting credit elsewhere.
Microsoft will release a third service pack for SQL Server 2005 just before the next version of the server software comes
out.
Service Pack 3 is expected to come out after the release to manufacturing of SQL Server 2008, which is scheduled to happen
in the third quarter this year.
Microsoft didn't reveal much about what the service pack would include, except to say in a Tuesday blog post that it will contain all cumulative updates to the software plus some additional fixes to bugs that customers have reported
on MS Connect, a Microsoft Web site for customer feedback.
A Microsoft spokesperson declined this afternoon to confirm reports circulating on technology blogs today citing purportedly leaked documents as saying the online release date for Windows XP Service Pack 3 will be April 29."We expect Windows XP SP3 to be available in 1H 2008, provided it meets our quality bar for release," stated the spokesperson, in response to BetaNews' question about the specific date.
The blog story appeared to indicate a large lag time between SP3's release through the Microsoft Update service and the release through Automatic Updates, purportedly in June. Those dates would indicate a long period of time for initial installers to make sure drivers are in working order, similar to what ended up being required for Windows Vista SP1.
Microsoft hinted that it might keep the software and hosted architecture built by Danger, the mobile company that designed
the software behind the Sidekick. The software giant announced the completion of its acquisition of the mobile developer on
Tuesday.
When Microsoft announced its intention to buy Danger in February, it didn't say much about its plans for Danger's technology. At the time, some Sidekick fans worried that Microsoft
might try to wrap some of the software into Windows Mobile but largely discontinue Danger's products.
Microsoft today unveiled a wide-ranging rebranding effort for its embedded OS offerings, designed to reduce complexity as the marketplace faces growing competition from Linux.
The announcement, made during the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2008 in San Jose, Calif., comes as Microsoft is working to stave off burgeoning rivalry in a space where it's been playing for more than a decade.
New naming won't kick in immediately for the all of Microsoft's embedded products, however. Instead, each product's moniker will change when it is updated to a new version.
Microsoft's soon-to-be-released SQL Server 2008 offers new support for spatial data types that some analysts say should deliver a real boost to geospatial applications and data sharing.
Expected to ship in the third quarter, the new version of SQL Server will allow storage of spatial data -- in the form of points, lines and polygons -- in SQL tables. The software will also offer a set of functions to allow the manipulation of this data and new spatial indexes to support the execution of these functions.