Microsoft shut off one of the primary engines of economic growth of the late 1990s yesterday, its stock option program, but it had been cool for a while. As the 20th century came to a close, billions of dollars in converted Microsoft options helped to boost home prices and consumers spending around Seattle. Now, the company will reward employees with actual stock, promising the region more moderate but also more reliable economic support. The economic effect of Microsoft options was staggering.
New public sector unit will focus heavily on combating Linux. As Microsoft's fiscal 2004 kicks into full swing, the Redmond software company is continuing to hone its organizational structure. One change likely to be announced soon is the merger of Microsoft's U.S. government operations with its education services business, according to one Microsoft vice president.
"We are increasing our staff across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and to integrate government and education. The goal is to do something similar in the U.S.," said Pete Hayes, vice president, public sector, for Microsoft EMEA.
Employees who joined Microsoft during the peak of the technology boom should celebrate yesterday's decision to scrap stock options in favor of stock awards, according to employment and recruiting experts.
That's because after three years of Microsoft stock declines, most of the options are worthless. Eliminating those options -- typically described as "underwater" -- could help Microsoft retain the top developers, marketers and salespeople who make the company tick.
The end of last month marked the third anniversary of Microsoft's launch of its .Net strategy, which executives such as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said at the time was a "bet-the-company thing." But three years later, reactions are mixed as to whether that strategy, along with the vision that accompanied it, has played out as the Redmond, Wash., software developer had hoped.
Rob Helms, research director for Directions on Microsoft, a research company that tracks Microsoft, in Kirkland, Wash., said the .Net initiative described a vision for how software and the Internet would evolve; a new platform for software development that supported the vision; and a new business-application hosting-that would drive future growth for the company.
On June 22, 2000, Microsoft announced a new strategy and vision for the company known as .Net, which it claimed would completely change the way companies use the Internet and transform Microsoft's business. Neil Charney, the director of Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, talked to eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli last week about how far the company has come with its .Net and Web services vision, what this means for customers, and what Microsoft's future vision for .Net and Web services involves.
Microsoft will replace its employee stock option plan with a program that will allow employees to earn actual Microsoft shares, the company said Tuesday. The "Stock Award" program will begin in September and is the result of a more than year-long review of compensation at Microsoft by the software maker's top management, with input from employees, the Redmond, Washington, company said in a statement.
The new scheme should help Microsoft attract and retain the best employees, the company said. Furthermore, although the plan is open to potentially all of Microsoft's employees, for 600 key executives a significant amount of stock-based compensation will depend on growth in customer numbers and customer satisfaction, Microsoft said.
Microsoft next month plans to release service packs to enable Commerce Server 2002 and Content Management Server 2002 to run on the latest Windows Server 2003 operating system. Currently, solution providers wanting to move customers on those e-business servers to Windows Server 2003 find it a rough row to hoe and are waiting for code to move the servers onto the new environment.
"We have to continue developing on Windows Server 2000 and then forklift everything over to 2003. We're waiting for an infrastructure fix that we presume will not affect the functionality of the solutions we're building," said one East Coast solution provider familiar with the issue.
Microsoft has expanded distribution of its MSN TV Internet service to several major retailers. The company said the RCA RM2100 Internet receiver that enables the service now is available in stores and on Web sites of companies including CompUSA, Fry's Electronics, Amazon.com, J&R Music & Computer World, BrandsMart and Abt Electronics.
The service gives people access to the Internet and e-mail through their TV sets. The receiver includes a wireless keyboard and remote and costs about $99. People also must subscribe to the MSN TV service to access the Web.
Building on their previous efforts to create a framework for producing secure and interoperable Web services, IBM, Microsoft, and several other leading software companies on Tuesday will announce a specification intended to help corporate users simplify identity management.
The proposed WS-Federation specification features a set of Web services technologies intended to give developers a standard way of adding security capabilities to any Web service they build. The specification defines mechanisms that allow developers to manage and establish trust relationships across companies and domains using a variety of different types of security solutions, including support for federated identities, according to company officials.
As Microsoft Corp. continues to try and better gauge the attraction of open-source technologies to its customers and developers, a number of its officials will be attending this week's O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, Ore. The convention brings together the leaders of more than nine open-source technologies, and sessions will cover everything from Apache, Java, MySQL and Perl to XML and products and services.