Network Attached Storage devices built on Windows are continuing to gain market share, according to research by IDC. Windows Powered NAS appliances accounted for 41 percent of unit shipments of NAS appliances in the first quarter of 2003. That's up 8 percentage points sequentially from the previous quarter. In a news release trumpeting the IDC research last week, Microsoft claimed to be gaining significant market share in the small and medium business sector of the NAS market.
"Open to new ideas. Plays well with others." Microsoft is getting this unexpectedly good feedback from competitors, as it readies the next version of its Office desktop application package.
The most notable new features in Office 2003 include the ability to save documents in XML (Extensible Markup Language) format in addition to in Office's native file format. This should allow data to be read by other software, such as corporate databases and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company is counting on those XML advantages to convince businesses that it's worth the investment to upgrade this time, given that many of them passed on the last few less-than-revolutionary Office upgrades.
Two long-time senior Oracle executives are leaving the company. Mark Jarvis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, is exiting after 14 years at the Redwood Shores, Calif. company. George Roberts, executive vice president, is also departing after 13 years. Confirming the planned departures, an Oracle spokeswoman characterized them as voluntary and amicable.
Oracle is noted for churning through top executives, many of whom leave when it is apparent that Ellison has no intention of giving up his top job. Notable former executives include Gary Bloom, now CEO of Veritas, and Ray Lane, now a venture capitalist with powerhouse firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. Ellison has characterized that as a badge of honor, saying Oracle's bench strength is so deep, its former executives are heading a bevy of tech companies.
With little fanfare, a federal judge has issued a critical ruling supporting a patent lawsuit against Microsoft brought by InterTrust, a digital rights management company. In a crucial preliminary hearing aimed essentially at setting the ground rules for the trial itself, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled strongly in favor of InterTrust Technologies. The company is suing Microsoft on 144 counts of patent infringement, contending that Microsoft products ranging from the Windows operating system to the Xbox game system violate its digital rights management patents.
No decision has been made on whether Microsoft actually has infringed on InterTrust's patents. But the so-called Markman hearing was a critical stage, at which definitions of terms and the scope of the patents were decided. Patent attorneys say a decision in favor of a patent holder greatly improves a lawsuit's ultimate chance of success. Armstrong's ruling was issued on July 3.
The expansion of phone monopolies in the Baby Bells, such as Verizon Communications and SBC Communications, must be handled carefully. If it is not, the United States could drop even further behind other nations in the implementation of broadband, damaging our economy, increasing consumer Internet bills and hampering the recovery of the Internet and telecommunications sectors.
The United States already lags behind much of the industrialized world in terms of how many of its people currently use broadband Internet service. For example, in Hong Kong, 66 percent of Internet homes have high-speed access, compared with just 17 percent in the United States.
Microsoft's technology dietitians offer employees only one item on the menu: dog food. That's because the software maker has a philosophy known internally as "eating our own dog food," referring to the common practice of running beta, or test, software throughout the organization.
The whole dog food concept has never been more important to Microsoft or potentially difficult. The Redmond, Wash.-based company now has more enterprise software testing at one time than perhaps any other time in its history. Testing products include: Exchange Server 2003, Office 2003 and Real-Time Communications Server, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows Messenger 5, among others.
Microsoft Wednesday issued a critical patch for a new vulnerability affecting Windows that could allow an attacker to execute code on a system. The flaw is a buffer overflow in a component of the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol that is used by Windows. The vulnerability affects an interface with RPC that deals with message exchange over TCP/IP port 135, according to Microsoft. An attacker who exploited the flaw could install programs, change data or create new accounts on an affected system. The Redmond, Wash.-based company rated the vulnerability as critical.
At long last, Microsoft is providing testers with its next-generation SQL Server code. To testers who've been awaiting Microsoft's first beta release of its next version of its SQL Server database: The wait is over. Microsoft on Tuesday released the first "private beta" of "Yukon" to 500 customers and partners. Microsoft will release the beta to another 1,500 testers by the end of the month. The company is making the bits available via its BetaPlace Web site.
Said one tester: "The Beta 1 release is being done in two phases over the next few weeks. In the first phase, the "priority" members of the beta group will get access. Within a few weeks, everyone (approved for the Beta) will have it." Another tester said all of the approved Beta 1 testers should have code in hand by August 1.
When we first reported on Windows Server 2003 we gave an indication on the numbers of sites that had been put up prior to the official launch. In the three months since the launch the number of active sites has increased by over 300% and now stands at 88,400.
Over the past 3 months many new hosting providers have released Windows Server 2003 hosting packages. Myhosting.com is now the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and apparently has stopped offering Windows Server 2000 and Microsoft-IIS/5.0 to new customers, inisisting that they should run Microsoft-IIS/6.0.
Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems.
The Justice Department and 19 states have made peace with Microsoft over its monopolistic misdeeds. But Tom Reilly is still on the company's case. The Massachusetts attorney general is the lone public-sector holdout who has refused to settle with the company over allegations that it tried to crush competitors with monopolistic tactics.
Reilly says he is defending consumers and his state's 3,000 software companies. Some, however, consider the attorney general's heel digging on Microsoft expensive folly, maybe even political grandstanding.