The European Commission fined Microsoft a massive 899 million ($1.3 billion) for continued failure to honor the 2004 antitrust
ruling against it, Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes said Wednesday.
Europe's top competition authority has already fined the company 777.5 million -- 497 million in the original ruling plus a further 280.5 million for noncompliance.
The latest punishment brings the total of fines to just under 1.7 billion ($2.6 billion) "for a clear disregard of its legal
obligations," Kroes said in a news conference.
The question of the day is, with Visual Studio 2008 already happening and SQL Server 2008 maybe not happening for real for at least another six months, just how many "heroes" will be "happening here" at the Windows Server 2008 launch gala?
At the front gate of the Nokia Theater outside the Convention Center here this morning, one of the Nokia workers asked me, "So where are the heroes?"
I tried to explain to him that the "heroes" were a metaphor for Microsoft's server software, being launched -- or otherwise unveiled -- this morning.
Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie said Tuesday that competitor Google owes its business in part
to Microsoft and that his company is not concerned about losing its position as an innovator in the technology market to the
search and advertising leader.
"If we didn't succeed at the PC, they wouldn't have a business," Mundie said of Google, in comments made via Webcast at the
Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
He said Google was able to grow so quickly because it introduced a new business model for the Web at just the right time.
After announcing it is being discontinued, Microsoft is offering the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 for under $50 - an amazing deal or a waste of cash depending on where you stand. While HD DVD will no longer continue as a format after Toshiba's withdrawal, and no new movies will be released, there are over 500 titles already available at discount prices. That could make the $50 investment very worthwhile, especially with Blu-ray players priced at least 6 times higher.
Microsoft this weekend announced that Service Pack 1 for System Center Operations Manager has been released to manufacturing and is now available for download online.
According to the company, this new version of Microsoft's monitoring solution features a number of updates, including better overall reliability and performance, improved reporting capabilities, simplified creation of management packs, and new Visio VDX export capability.
"This release of SP1 marks an important milestone for the System Center Operations Manager 2007, making the product easier to support, easier to use and easier to deploy," the company said of the release on its System Center Team blog.
Microsoft has begun sending out invitations to a private technical beta test for the next major release of Internet Explorer, according to an e-mail invitation that leaked out online.
While the invitation-only private beta will be just that ? private ? and will be focused on developers, members of the IE team said in the purloined e-mail that a full-scale beta test is not far off.
"We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test," the e-mail said.
On-again, off-again partners Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft -- who nominally compete in the endpoint security space (Microsoft touts a NAC vision of its own) and business telephony segments (Microsoft has made an aggressive incursion into a segment that Cisco itself hopes to dominate) -- are as cozy as ever again.
The vendors touted a new and inevitably to-be-delivered offering based on Redmond's forthcoming Windows Server 2008 operating system and Cisco's WAN optimization technology.
A major outage to Microsoft Windows Live services has left an unknown number of users unable to access MSN Messenger, Hotmail and other services since earlier today. Progress is being made on resolving the situation, the company says.Initially believed to be an incident isolated to the east coast of the United States, users from the west coast and several other nations also reported they have been unable to access any Windows Live services since sometime around 6:30 a.m. EST.
Microsoft introduced an updated version of .Net Micro Framework, a platform for the development of applications that run in
a variety of embedded devices, such as retail point-of-sale terminals and home automation systems.
Microsoft first introduced the .Net Micro Framework about a year ago in an effort to make it easier for developers to create
such applications. It was designed to attract developers who may have avoided using the Windows CE embedded OS because the
hardware was too expensive and the OS too complex. With the .Net programming environment, developers can use Visual Studio
to more quickly and easily develop applications.
The European Union may hit Microsoft with a record $2.2 billion (1.5 billion Euros) fine as early as tomorrow for not complying with parts of the EU's antitrust ruling from 2004, according to a published report.
The news story by Bloomberg cites three anonymous sources familiar with the plan as saying that the EU is imposing the maximum fine because Microsoft has not offered what the EU considers "reasonable" charges when it comes to the patent licenses competitors need to interoperate with Microsoft software.