Microsoft released Windows Vista to the world one year ago with ads likening the new PC operating system to such awe-inspiring moments as the first American spaceflight and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Charles Walling just wants it to work with his printer.
The retired Seattle warehouseman has spent hours on the Dell tech support line, installed all the drivers and, yes, double-checked all the cords and plugs. No luck. The cause of the problem isn't clear, but Walling knows one thing: The same printer worked with Windows Vista's predecessor, Windows XP.
A U.S. judge extended antitrust oversight of Microsoft until November 2009 on Tuesday, rebuffing the company's arguments but stopping well short of the additional five years that New York, California and other states had sought.
The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, keeps intact a series of provisions meant to prevent Microsoft from using its Windows monopoly to unfair advantage. Among other things, those provisions prohibit the company from retaliating against computer makers.
The economy may be headed south, but Microsoft believes the personal computer market is perking up.
The company in its second quarter report Thursday said it expects worldwide PC shipments in fiscal 2008 to increase by 11% to 13%. That's up a point from the market prediction Microsoft released three months ago in its first-quarter report when it said it expected PC shipments for the year to grow by 10% to 12%.
While the 1% revision may not sound like much, it adds up to a lot of extra hardware on the market.
Microsoft has joined an industry group dedicated to giving Internet users the power to move personal data between online social networks and other Web sites.
The software maker said Thursday it was joining DataPortability.org to join the industry in discussing portability, security, and privacy of individuals' information online. "There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the Internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users," the company said in a statement.
Microsoft said on Tuesday that its Visual Studio 2008 IDE is now widely available. The tool set was released to Microsoft Developer Network subscribers in November. It is now available to volume licensing
and retail customers, the company said in a blog posting.
It includes a new version of the .NET framework, version 3.5, which is aimed at taking advantage of two new subsystems Microsoft
included in Windows Vista -- WCF and WPF. WCF is for
building service-oriented applications, while WPF is for creating more dynamic user interfaces. Microsoft also built Visual
Studio 2008 with the idea of making it easier for developers to create cross-platform applications.
Haven't downloaded the latest service pack for Office 2003? Unless you turn off automatic updates, you will soon. Microsoft will begin automatically distributing Office 2003 SP3 via Microsoft Update at the end of February.
Customers who haven't installed SP3 by that time will see their computers automatically download the new service pack beginning February 27, though Microsoft says the process is "gradual" and distribution won't happen all at once.
The company made this announcement via its Microsoft Update product team's blog over the weekend. The forewarning keeps with an announcement Microsoft made when it released Office 2007 SP1 in December that it would give clear release guidance on Office service packs so as to prepare individuals and organizations for their updates.
While Microsoft remains cagey about its plans for Windows 7, its successor to Windows Vista, a very early pre-release version, the M1 or milestone 1 build, has been making the rounds online this week, causing a flurry of excitement despite the fact that there's nothing truly exciting about the build at all. As one might expect of a very early version of the next Windows, Windows 7 build 6519 looks and acts almost exactly like Windows Vista, with only minor changes here and there, none of which are particularly notable. What can't be determined from this build, of course, is whether Windows 7 will be a big deal or what I think of as "Vista R2," a minor follow-on to Vista that adds some new features and lots of fit and finish work.
A Microsoft partner has become the first to offer Microsoft's new unified communications software as a hosted service.
Intermedia on Tuesday will begin offering Microsoft Office Communications Server as a hosted service on a subscription
basis for $7.95 per user, per month, said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia. The service initially
will be available to users of Intermedia's hosted Exchange service, which costs $12 per user, per month. Eventually, the OCS
service will be available independently of that service, he said.
Similar to a stash of weapons a player might rack up during an online adventure game, high technology companies for more than two decades have racked up as many patents as possible.
Patents can come in handy, for instance, as a defense ? or an offensewhen one company sues another for patent infringement.
On the other hand, cross-licensing patents between two or more companies can cement business collaborations.
For years, IBM has been one of the most prolific tech companies in terms of piling up patents.
Microsoft's recent jump in Windows sales can be traced in part to a basic concept -- getting more people who use its programs to pay for them.
The company says efforts to curb software piracy have added to its revenue in each of its last two quarters, helping it exceed Wall Street's expectations. One analyst says the trend may add a cumulative total of more than $1 billion to Microsoft's PC Windows revenue over five years.
It's not without risk for the company. Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool has irked some PC users by mistakenly tagging their authentic copies as counterfeit. And in countries with high piracy rates, crackdowns could cause people to opt for free or low-cost alternatives, such as the Linux operating system.