WinInsider

Oracle's $6.3 billion hostile bid for PeopleSoft might force Microsoft to sell business-management software to bigger customers to keep Oracle and SAP AG from dominating the market, an analyst said. Microsoft sells applications such as payroll and accounting programs to clients with less than $800 million in annual sales, while Oracle and SAP focus on larger companies.

The decades-old rivalry between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. is heating up again. This time, the companies are jockeying for position in a market that rapidly is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for winning and keeping customers: identity management.

Novell, one of the established players in identity management, this week plans to unveil two additions to its already-large product portfolio in the space, Nsure Audit and a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) extension for iChain. The auditing piece addresses what customers say has been a glaring weakness in Novell's offerings-that is, the ability to securely log and audit all user log-in activity on a system.

Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base is misunderstood. The controversial proposal for delivering client security through integrated hardware and software has some privacy advocates and conspiracy theorists crying foul. But several details have emerged that demonstrate that this code won't be running secretively in the background, and in fact that it looks like a promising, user-controlled defense against privacy intrusions and security violations.

The first thing you have to know is what to call it. The code-name was "Palladium." The formal name is way too long, and even pronouncing the letters NGSCB is a mouthful. Microsoft uses the guttural acronym "ING-scub."

After making relatively little noise about metadirectory services for several years, Microsoft on Wednesday said it had released to manufacturing a new metadirectory product called Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003. The product is a complete overhaul of the Microsoft Metadirectory Services that the software giant delivered for Windows 2000 and had based partly on technology it purchased from Zoomit Corp. in 1999.

The Justice Department and 16 states raised concerns yesterday about the rates Microsoft Corp. is charging for technical information that lets competitors' software work more effectively on the company's Windows operating system.

In their first formal status report to the judge overseeing the company's compliance with its antitrust settlement, the department and states, including New York and California, said they may need to seek a court order to ensure that Microsoft licenses the technical information in a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" manner.

Shares of Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, were upgraded to "buy" yesterday by Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Jason Maynard, who raised his fiscal 2004 profit estimate and said Microsoft may boost its dividend. Maynard, hired by Merrill in March, wrote to clients that he estimates Microsoft earned 24 cents in the quarter ended Monday, a 1-cent increase in his forecast. He raised his rating from "neutral" and put Microsoft on the Focus One list of Merrill's favorite stocks.

Shortly after the Redmond, Wash. software maker held its Anglo-Washingtonian press conference to announce 15 separate lawsuits against spammers here and in the United Kingdom, reports started cropping up in the British press about one Simon Grainger, a Microsoft spam defendant loudly proclaiming his innocence.

"I didn't even know what the writ was, the first time I read it," the stunned Grainger told the Liverpool Daily Post. "It's the kind of thing that would give you a heart attack."

Grainger, a 43-year-old telecommunications engineer and father of three daughters, says he bought a domain name once owned by a spammer, and has won support for his claims of innocence from U.K.-based antispam group the Spamhaus Project.

Shares in Microsoft rallied Monday, fueled by speculation that the software giant is mulling whether to raise its dividend again. According to reports in the Financial Times and its sister publication Les Echoes, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is considering whether to pay a one-time, $10 billion dividend to shareholders, among other options. This would represent the largest single payout to investors ever made by a company.

On the other hand, Microsoft may decide to gradually increase its dividend, buy back its shares or acquire other companies in order to reduce its cash holdings of $46 billion, according to the reports. The company has come under pressure to share its cash hoard with investors as its growth has slowed. Microsoft is expected to settle on a plan by year's end.

In a sign that Microsoft is making strides in the storage arena, the market share for Windows in Network Attached Storage devices rose 8 percent in the first quarter to 41 percent. Microsoft trumpeted the increase Monday in a press release, citing data from market research firm IDC. IDC analyst Brad Nisbet confirmed the Redmond, Wash.-based company's gain and said it was driven partly by sales of Windows-powered Network Attached Storage (NAS) gear from Dell Computer.

But Nisbet cautioned that Windows-powered NAS devices tend to be lower-end machines. In 2002, he said, Windows-powered equipment accounted for 32 percent of all NAS unit shipments but just 12 percent of overall NAS revenue, which totaled $1.49 billion. NAS refers to storage gear that connects to other devices via a local area network, typically an Ethernet network.

The Massachusetts attorney general's office is investigating whether Microsoft tried to squash Linux in violation of the consent decree settling the company's landmark antitrust case. Massachusetts, the only state still pursuing antitrust charges against the software maker, said in a court filing that it "is looking at several issues related to potential enforcement of the decree." These include whether Microsoft has retaliated against an unspecified computer maker for promoting Linux and has signed unlawfully restrictive agreements with Internet service providers. The Redmond, Wash., software giant has targeted Linux, an open-source operating system, as a significant challenger to the status of its own proprietary software.