In a move that could lead to lower prices for Microsoft's software in other countries, the Redmond, Washington, software company has cut the price of its Windows operating system and Office application suite in Thailand, according to a report released by market analyst Gartner Inc.
"Microsoft -- in response to a Linux threat -- recently reduced pricing to $40 for an Office and Windows package it offered as part of a government initiative in Thailand," said the report.
"Microsoft may offer a similar package in China as an incentive to keep Chinese enterprises using its products," the report added.
Microsoft is taking steps to embrace and extend another standard development technology, this time in the modeling arena. The Redmond, Wash., company is developing its own model-driven architecture for a future release of its Visual Studio .Net development environment. The new architecture will be based on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) standard, sources said.
Chief Software Architect and Chairman Bill Gates has publicly described the company's goals to add support for model-driven development to Microsoft products leading up to the release of the company's "Longhorn" operating system, expected in 2005.
Riding a tide of desktop domination, Microsoft's latest foray into presence is expected to kick-start corporate adoption of IM. Lateness to market, however, has analysts skeptical as to how the offering will compete against those of longtime collaboration players such as IBM.
Office Live Communications Server 2003 -- code-named Greenwich and previously known as Real Time Communications Server -- was released to manufacturing last week. Microsoft sees the product's delivery, slated for six to eight weeks, as a "key moment" in establishing IM as a business tool, said Ed Simnett, lead product manager at Microsoft.
In the news-from-the-bizarre category comes a bunch of reports that Windows Update is now running on Linux in order to protect the service from the MSBlaster worm. Gosh, that would be such an awesome story if it were true, wouldn't it? Sadly, the truth, as always, is a bit less sensational. A quick visit to Netcraft shows that windowsupdate.microsoft.com is running the curious combination of the Linux OS and the Microsoft IIS Web server, leading to wild speculation. What's happened is that Microsoft has redirected the windowsupdate.com URL to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, as previously reported. Previously, windowsupdate.com was the primary first stop for Windows Update requests and, naturally, it runs some form Windows Server. When Microsoft did the redirect, however, it had to move to a new front-line of defense, so it used its long-time partner Akamai, which runs a caching service that utilizes Linux. As I noted repeatedly, this is exactly the kind of infrastructure server that Linux is perfect for, but the servers aren't owned or run by Microsoft. They just provide a low-level service. And those Linux servers are, of course, simply routing Windows users to Windows Server-based servers that host the Windows Update service. It's worth noting that if MSBlaster had been better written, this solution wouldn't have worked, and the Linux servers would simply have been taken down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. So don't get too excited by the notion that Microsoft is somehow utilizing Linux for better security or whatever. It ain't so: Linux just happens to be what Akamai uses for this type of service.
Hmmmm, it is nice to have multi-billion research department...
Microsoft is "investing heavily" in Web search as an important and potentially lucrative market, Christopher Payne, the executive in charge of search, said on Thursday. "On the information side of the house, there's no question that search is the cornerstone of our strategy. We're investing heavily in this space," Payne said. He declined to say how much money or how many people Microsoft was investing in the project, however. Microsoft, the No. 1 software maker, earlier this year released its Web crawler, which collects the building blocks of information upon which Web search engines are built.
Without giving specifics, Payne said Microsoft's research department is devoting significant resources to the company's search project.
A Microsoft- and IBM-backed group that promotes the use of the emerging UDDI Web services specification announced Thursday that its members would start distributing test copies of the latest version of the spec.
The UDDI, or Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, specification serves as a registry and locator service that identifies and catalogs Web services applications so they can be easily found online. The UDDI Business Registry Operators Council, made up of IBM, Microsoft, NTT Communications and SAP, is promoting usage of UDDI by providing support to the software-developer community.
When the Windows XP "Luna" user interface was revealed in February 2001, the Windows User Experience team took great pleasure when they verified that I had never seen a leaked copy of the UI before the official unveiling. I decided, at that moment, that the next Windows version would be different. Here, for the first time, is a gallery of UI prototypes that I believe accurately portrays the "Aero" user interface in Longhorn. They are presented in reverse chronological order, so that the olders pictures are at the bottom. Naturally, things could change and, if anything, I expect the UI to be more impressive in person than what we see here. But at the very least, the task-oriented nature of Longhorn comes through nicely in these shots.
A market analyst is warning customers not to expect Windows "Longhorn," the code-name for the successor to Windows XP, until 2006. That date is a year later than Microsoft's most recent statements on when customers could expect the operating system to ship.
"Given that Microsoft is delivering not just one but many Longhorn products, we don't expect this next version of Windows to be generally available until 2006," Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox said in a statement released Wednesday. "Microsoft will also want to give software developers and end-users time to prepare for the new file system."
One of the most confusing aspects of Windows Server 2003 for users is sorting out the differences between free add-on services and the expensive back-end servers that build on, but also partially duplicate, the services' functionality.
Examples of free add-on services for Windows Server 2003 that fit this model are the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and the real-time communications services. Each service is complemented by a server product -- Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on the one hand and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 on the other.
As the needs of businesses continue to evolve, Microsoft remains committed to ensuring the success of its customers by providing innovative developer tools that meet these ever-changing requirements. To help organizations plan future software development efforts, Microsoft is providing a roadmap to its planned developer tools offerings. In particular, this document focuses on the following product releases:
- Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (2003)
- Visual Studio code name "Whidbey" (2004)
- Visual Studio code name "Orcas" (2005)