Gateway has agreed to preload all of its consumer PCs with Microsoft's MSN 8 Internet software and dial-up access, in a move that Microsoft hopes will help it get a bigger share of the Net access market, particularly broadband.
As part of the deal, announced Friday, Microsoft is running a promotion that offers consumers who sign up for its service through Gateway three free months of MSN 8 dial-up access, or two free months of premium service for MSN 8 Internet Software. The premium service is a play for bring-your-own-access (BYOA) broadband customers who get their high-speed access through a third-party provider and pay Microsoft separately for its Internet software and services.
Microsoft on Thursday introduced a more flexible pricing plan for its Xbox Live online video game service, including a planned free trial period, and raised the price on the basic starter kit. Microsoft, which is expected to roll out a number of new audio and video services related to Xbox Live at next week's Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, said subscribers will have the option of a $5.99 monthly fee in North America as of this fall.
A one-year renewal or new subscription will be $49.99, while the Starter Kit, which includes a headset for voice communications and some bundled game products, will sell for $69.99, a hike from the current $49.99 price.
Microsoft is trying to make security obvious. The software giant plans to visually alter document or application windows that contain private information that's secured through Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), formerly known as Palladium. Secure windows will look different than regular, unsecured windows in order to remind users that they are looking at confidential material, Peter Biddle, product unit manager for Microsoft, said Thursday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here.
"We know that users need to be able to tell the difference between a trusted window and a regular one," Biddle said. "The window (will be) noticeably different."
Microsoft is expanding its involvement in the rewritable DVD market, announcing Thursday that future versions of Windows will support all major formats.
The software giant said at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in New Orleans that it will provide built-in support for DVD+RW, DVD-RW/-R and DVD-RAM in future versions of its desktop operating system. The move builds off the company's support for the DVD+RW format, which it announced at last year's WinHEC, and support for DVD-RAM in Windows XP.
At the very least, the support for the formats in Windows will mean that people won't have to download additional software to have their computers recognize newly installed DVD rewritable drives or discs.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer expressed certainty on Thursday that an investigation by the European Commission into possible anti-competitive practices would come up with a 'workable' solution. 'The European Commission ... is not out to punish anybody, it is out to ensure that the citizens and the competitors doing business in Europe have an appropriate chance to flourish,' he said.
'I am sure that exercising that responsibility well will wind up with a result that is workable for everybody,' he said. The Commission has been investigating Microsoft for abuse of a dominant position for nearly three years. Ballmer said earlier this week in Stockholm that Microsoft was working constructively with European authorities.
Reflecting the increasing overlap between the worlds of B2B and consumer electronics, Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a menu of PC-centric solutions designed to help home users leverage their computers for digital media and entertainment.
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here, the software giant unveiled five initiatives aimed at advancing the PC platform: the Media Center TV client, content directory services, Universal Audio Architecture (UAA), Media Transport Protocol (MTP) and High-Performance Media Access Technology (HighMAT). Working with Microsoft on those efforts are companies such as Intel for UAA, ATI Technologies for Media Center TV, Creative Technology for MTP, Onkyo for content delivery services and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) for HighMAT.
Microsoft plans to retool its Windows XP operating system so that two people can run applications on the same machine concurrently, an important step toward the company's goal of transforming the PC into a home entertainment center.
Service Pack 2 of Windows XP, coming later this year, will let one person manipulate applications via the keyboard while another person views pictures or surfs the Internet on the same computer via a smart display, Megan Kidd, product manager for Windows Powered Smart Displays at Microsoft.
Microsoft on Thursday plans to unveil new antispam tools for its MSN and Hotmail services, noting that it now blocks 2.4 billion e-mail messages targeting subscriber in-boxes every day.
Microsoft said MSN 8 and Hotmail subscribers this week can elect to turn off images within e-mails, a feature that the company said would help cut down on spam. Images may conceal so-called "Web beacons" that confirm a particular e-mail address is in use. That's important to spammers, who frequently use dictionary attacks that blanket domains with thousands of random variations in the hopes of hitting a handful of targets. Beacons can be triggered when images appear in a preview window, meaning recipients do not need to open the file to be painted as a target.
Microsoft is gearing up for the next major release of Windows, code-named Longhorn, and doesn't plan an interim release before that product launch, which is slated for 2005, said Will Poole, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Client Division.
Some developers here said they're skeptical that Microsoft will be able to meet the 2005 timetable. One software engineer for a California company, who requested anonymity, said that if Microsoft is predicting a 2005 release, it's likely that the product launch could be as far off as 2007. There is "a high probability" that the 2005 date will slip based on Microsoft's past software development track record, he said. Other developers here said that porting to Longhorn could be a challenge, in part because of the operating system's 3-D capabilities.
A pair of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) groups have jointly released 10 new working drafts of specifications intended to allow collections of XML (Extensible Markup Language) files on the Web to be queried like databases.
The drafts address various aspects of the problem of locating and retrieving information from documents compliant with XML, a protocol for describing the type of data contained in a structured document. Solving that problem is the task of the W3C's XML Query working group, with the assistance of the XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) working group.
The core of the XML Query group's efforts is the creation of XQuery, a language for searching XML documents. Among the 10 new drafts is an updated version of the XQuery 1.0 specification, as well as an updated version of the closely related draft of XPath 2.0, a language for addressing parts of XML documents.