Microsoft, state prosecutors, and the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday said a federal judge needs more time to weigh whether Redmond should be subjected to a lengthier period of antitrust policing.
In a joint filing with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who has been overseeing Microsoft's antitrust compliance, they asked for a soon-to-expire oversight period to be temporarily extended until at latest January 31, 2008. That way, the judge will have more time to weigh the merits of last-minute pleas from a number of state prosecutors to add another five years to the oversight regime.
Experts say that migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down because all the low-hanging fruit has now been picked. Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.
The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.
Microsoft is doing more than snapping up advertising companies and cementing ad partnerships. On the infrastructure side of its growing advertising business, It also is continuing to refine its platform and tools for its existing customer base.
The adCenter team upgraded the adCenter online-ad platform with a handful of new features over the weekend, according to a post on the adCenter blog. The refreshes fall into three buckets, according to the company.
The Windows Server team has decided to decouple its Windows SharePoint Services collaboration/document workflow subsystem from Windows Server 2008.
In its acknowledgement of the move, Julius Sinkevicius, Windows Server Senior Product Manager, announced the decision via the Windows Server blog on October 29. Sinkevicius was somewhat vague about the reasons why the server team decided to make WSS 3.0 available as a free download, rather than make WSS 3.0 available as part of the final version of Windows Server 2008, which is slated to be released to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008.
At this weeks Microsofts 2007 Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management conference in Redmond, Wash., company officials will lay out a long-awaited roadmap for Microsofts SOA strategy. But noticeably absent will be target due dates for any of the myriad products that company officials plan to discuss.
Microsoft is promising a number of new "technology investments that it has code-named "Oslo that will cut across its product stack and provide the foundation for its SOA platform. Among them:
BizTalk Server 6: The core foundation product for Microsoft SOA and BMP solutions that will "deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
Microsoft has hired the creator of the SubSonic tool set and plans to use SubSonic as a key part of an upcoming platform.
Rob Conery founded the open-source SubSonic project, which helps a Web site build itself, according to SubSonic's Web site. Conery blogged about the hire Oct. 26, with a host of observers chiming in to respond about the news.
According to the Web site, SubSonic is several things, including the following: "a Data Access Layer builder that requires no code on your part, it builds itself at compile time with a full object layer and strongly typed collections; a complete utility tool set, complete with Rails-like scaffolding, migrations and code generators; a dynamic query tool that lets you use SQL Server and the Enterprise Library without having to know SQL; and an Object/Relational Mapper that extends to views and stored procedures so you're not locked into the OR/M thing."
Changes to the work management business will be driven by the move towards standardized applications, transparency and accountability, the changing work force, and the notion of people always being on and connected and suffering from information overload.
So said Mike Angiulo, the general manager for Microsoft Office Project, during his opening keynote at its user conference here Oct. 29.
Underscoring the notion of information overload, Angiulo told the hundreds of attendees that more records will be created over the next five years than have been created in total until now, which was helping drive the trend toward heavily customized environments.
Less than a month after it launched a free online service to let consumers access their own medical records online, Microsoft is going deeper into offering software for health care. The company announced Monday that it is acquiring the software used to run the largest private hospital in Southeast Asia.
Microsoft announced the acquisition of "software, intellectual property and other assets" from Global Care Solutions, a privately-held company based in Bangkok, Thailand, according to a company statement.
Microsoft executives said they are working hard to finish up its Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Project 2007, an update that some users have been waiting for before deploying the most recent version of the software.
SP1 will update Project Professional 2007, Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007, said Keshav Puttaswamy, group program manager at Microsoft, speaking during the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle on Monday.
It will primarily fix bugs and improve stability and performance, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. It will also enhance some cache features, he said.
Microsoft is at work on a project to enable everyday developers to build Web applications, just as easily as folks have built Visual Basic applications over the years.
The project to enable this is called Volta and it is headed up by Erik Meijer, a Microsoft architect in the company's SQL Server group. Meijer gave a demonstration of Volta at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems and Applications) here on Oct. 23 and later discussed the technology with me.
"If you look at when VB came on the market, it was really, really hard to do Windows programming," Meijer said. "You had to be a C++ programmer, and then VB came around and then suddenly people could write Windows programs. Now it's the era of the Web, but in some senses we're back in the early days of Windows programming."