The Justice Department has decided not to participate in the continuing legal fight involving two states that refused to settle antitrust claims against Microsoft, possibly strengthening the appeals case by the holdout states. The Justice Department notified the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington on May 21 that it will not file a brief in the case. The government earlier had indicated it might actively defend the landmark settlement it reached with Microsoft and 17 other states.
The decision means Massachusetts and West Virginia, which are seeking tougher sanctions against Microsoft, won't have to directly fight the U.S. government while they're battling the software giant in the courtroom.
Microsoft is phasing out standalone versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, according to statements attributed to IE program manager Brian Countryman in an interview posted on the software giant's Web site.
"As part of the OS (operating system), IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation," Countryman said in the the May 7 interview.
Microsoft issued a standalone browser with IE 6, following a court ruling that found the company had violated antitrust laws by bundling IE with its Windows operating system. The company has since settled the case with the Justice Department and most of the other parties to the suit, although a handful of holdouts continue to press for additional remedies.
Microsoft planted the seeds of Thursday's surprise antitrust settlement following a sweeping management shakeup at AOL Time Warner that culminated with America Online founder Steve Case announcing his resignation as chairman in January.
With Case on his way out, Microsoft founder Bill Gates made the first move to settle the case, phoning AOL Time Warner's then-chairman elect Dick Parsons about two months ago to discuss a possible resolution. In announcing the $750 million settlement, Gates hinted that the change in the AOL guard may have helped the talks along.
"We have had good relationships with a number of the groups at AOL Time Warner, including Warner Music and the cable people, and this allows us now to take advantage of all the discussions we've had there," he said during a conference call with reporters. America Online was notably absent from Gates' list of friendly groups.
In the escalating controversy that pits The SCO Group--owner of one of the original Unix operating systems--against Linux developers and distributors, Microsoft has come down, predictably, on the side of SCO. Yet, overlooked in the stir created when Microsoft recently licensed SCO's Unix for use in some of its products is the fact that Microsoft itself has been easing restrictions on its own code.
May marks the second anniversary of Microsoft's so-called shared-source initiative. Microsoft has made parts of its Windows and Windows CE operating systems available to third parties, as well as elements of its Passport identity-management software, Visual Studio .Net development environment, and ASP.Net. The world's largest commercial software company is increasingly letting other developers not only view the internal workings of its operating systems and middleware, but also modify portions of its software and sell products that incorporate the changed code.
What were we fighting about?
The failure to find an answer to that question likely brought the long and complex feud between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner to an end. Although the software giant and the publishing conglomerate have fought in court and in the marketplace for years, the shifting industry landscape has made the two rivals unlikely allies again.
In many ways, the Microsoft-AOL rivalry is about two companies that tried to take on each other and failed. The duel was set, but someone always got lost on the way to the fight.
When AOL bought Netscape Communications in November 1998, for example, the online service provider was worried about being marginalized on the desktop by Microsoft. At the same time, the combined AOL and Netscape, in conjunction with Sun Microsystems, also planned to create a parallel software universe that would develop servers and software for consumer-electronics devices to challenge Microsoft.
Microsoft Corp. is using a twist on some old technology -- FM radio waves -- to deliver instant messages, headlines and traffic updates to a new generation of gadgets that will fit on your wrist or keychain. The software company has big spending plans for its latest family of products, expected to go on sale in months, and some technology experts who have seen early prototypes are impressed.
But Microsoft enters a wireless market crowded with pagers, handheld computers and cellular phones, and it still is signing contracts with companies that will provide information for the devices.
Microsoft reached out last week to soothe users irritated by its controversial Software Assurance purchasing plan by offering a number of free technical support, training, and software installation tools.
"This is an effort to reconnect with our customers to give them something back to strengthen the relationship. There was a lot of stress in that relationship and this move, which we hope is the first of many, is a way to let them know we have taken their feedback to heart," said Rebecca LaBrunerie, Microsoft's product marketing manager for worldwide licensing and pricing in Redmond, Wash.
The technical support programs that will now be made available include a self-paced e-learning training course and free tools to help users better deploy Microsoft software. The Corporate Error Reporting tool will allow users to send bug reports to IT managers, and Win PE is a mini RAM-imaging tool that helps IT managers roll out software for numerous desktop systems. The company also will offer a TechNet tool that searches for relevant technical information.
Unwanted commercial e-mail, better known as spam, can be contained within two years but will first reach unprecedented proportions, Microsoft's chief spam fighter said Thursday.
"Spam has reached epic proportions and we are in a crisis situation," said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft's antispam technology and strategy group, speaking at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus here.
"For a lot of people out there the situation has gotten so bad that they are willing to give up e-mail if the spam situation does not get better," he said.Almost half of all e-mail today is spam, according to Hamlin, who cited figures from Brightmail. And it is about to get worse.
Microsoft is expanding its security business unit with a group that will establish new software development processes and create tools for its programmers so that future Microsoft products will have fewer security flaws, a Microsoft executive said. The new Security Engineering Strategy team will look at security across all Microsoft product lines, with the ultimate goal being that customers will take security for granted in Microsoft products, Steve Lipner, the recently named director of Security Engineering Strategy at Microsoft, said in an interview on Wednesday.
"My position really is recognition of the fact that there are a lot of security aspects to building and shipping software products at Microsoft and we need to do a more coherent job of looking forward across all the products we ship, trying to address security holes before they are discovered outside of Microsoft," Lipner said.
In March, Kevin Johnson was put in charge of worldwide sales, marketing, and services at Microsoft. An 11-year Microsoft veteran, he stepped up from the post of senior vice president responsible for sales at Microsoft Americas. Two months into the job, Johnson talked with IDG News Service about Microsoft's sales mission and challenges and the money the software vendor allegedly has set aside to squash Linux.
IDGNS: What changes did you make when you took over this job?
Johnson: Certainly I had to backfill my responsibilities where I was running Microsoft Americas. A number of individuals stepped in to some key roles in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. We have taken some steps over the last three months in something that we call transformation, which is about getting our businesses around the world aligned behind a set of go-to-market activities and the various business groups that we have. Subsidiaries around the world have been getting organized around a common organizational blueprint for how we link back into our business groups.