WinInsider

We constantly receive complaints from our readers about major hardware vendors, but over the past several months, there's been an unusual increase. In particular, we've seen a rise in criticism of the products and customer support of Dell, the world's most successful PC manufacturer. We are therefore somewhat surprised to find that service and reliability have actually improved slightly this year. Once again, Dell is a top vendor in the survey's desktop category, tied with Apple in receiving an A+.

Internet phone calling is poised for a major boost as cable giants get into the game, but some of the biggest players are holding back even as millions of broadband customers convert to so-called voice over Internet Protocol service. While still just a trickle, early defectors to voice over IP (VOIP) represent the vanguard in a trend that some analysts believe could soon roil the communications industry.

Independent VOIP providers such as Vonage and 8x8 are beginning to steal consumers from tradition phone operators with flat rate VOIP plans that cost between $20 and $40 a month for local and long distance calls.

Microsoft continued its push to help acclimate academic computer science programs to its .NET Framework Thursday with a user interface that helps teachers and students use their Java-based curriculum with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

The Microsoft Supplemental User Interface (UI) Library for Visual J# .NET functions somewhat like the 2 JFC Swing specification, a family of Java class libraries provided as part of J2SE to support building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and graphics functionality for Java applications.

Microsoft is dusting off its year-old and mostly forgotten TrustBridge technology and recasting it as middleware to support federation of identities across disparate platforms, company officials said Wednesday.

Microsoft said at the annual Burton Group Catalyst Conference that TrustBridge will become a security server capable of producing a user authentication and authorization token in a variety of formats. It will also facilitate the sharing of that token across corporate boundaries.

With employee stock grants in the offing, are you ready to walk the Redmond plank?

To join or not to join the ranks of the Evil Empire? That's a question that many in the tech industry have contemplated, at one time or another. With Microsoft's decision this week to grant employees shares of stock, rather than mere stock options, the question gets more interesting.

Former journalists, analysts, Microsoft competitors, Microsoft customers - probably many of the readers of this column - have toyed with the idea of what it would be like to work for Microsoft. I can count several former colleagues of mine who took the plunge (and are a lot richer for their decisions).

Microsoft, which has denied it was targeting big payroll- and accounting-software clients, is changing strategy and selling to larger customers, a move that puts the company in direct competition with Oracle.

"This will be a head-on collision with Oracle, you bet," Orlando Ayala, a Microsoft senior vice president who runs sales to small and mid-sized companies, said in an interview. "They are moving down to smaller customers, and we are moving up."

I was not thrilled last week to see that sales of notebook computers are now larger than the sales of desktops. Not that I don't understand the attraction. Notebooks are, after all, romantic computing--in the sense that notebooks allow you to take your computer to someplace more romantic than your office. That is, as long as it's a romantic place indoors--notebook screens don't work outside, at least not for me. So I guess taking a notebook to sunny Bora-Bora to write my columns on the beach is out of the question (and my travel budget).

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review stirred unusual interest within the senior ranks of the computer industry by contending that the broad availability of information technology has dulled IT's effectiveness as a competitive weapon.

Since then the piece, "IT Doesn't Matter," has been endlessly dissected--as much as for what it suggested as for what it reported. Indeed, if the central thesis of the article proves true, the implications for an IT industry struggling to recover from nearly three fallow years are grave.

Like most tech companies, Microsoft has more than an academic interest in how all this turns out. The company, which has sold billions of dollars of software over the years, would suffer the effects of yet another slowdown in customer buying.

The investment world was abuzz yesterday over an unusual proposal that comes along with Microsoft's landmark decision to stop giving its employees stock options. As part of planned its switch from options to actual stock, the Redmond company is working with investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase on an arrangement that would allow its employees to wring a modest return from stock options that have otherwise been rendered worthless by the company's declining share price.

Microsoft, the world's largest company by market value, has $46 billion in cash and may raise its payout to shareholders after deciding employees will receive stock instead of options to buy shares.

"The individuals that make the decisions on the dividend are the senior executives," said Diane Garnick, chief U.S. portfolio strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. "Since these executives are going to be paid in stock rather than options, they will be the beneficiaries of those dividends." Allianz AG owns both Dresdner Kleinwort and Dresdner RCM, an investment firm that held 77 million Microsoft shares in March.