Three years ago, Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer huddled at the Renaissance Paris Hotel with then-sales chief Orlando Ayala and Group Vice-President Jeffrey S. Raikes. The goal: to come up with a big new growth market. And they aimed sky-high. Plotting into the wee hours, the trio hammered out a plan to sell run-the-business applications for small and midsize companies. With 45 million such businesses worldwide, this was perhaps the biggest untapped software market left. To unlock it, Microsoft would need to spend billions acquiring companies and hiring hundreds of new employees.
Ditto has drop me a note about Microsoft Windows Messenger 5.0 beta program invitation email that Microsoft has send, which reads...
As an existing Microsoft beta participant, the Microsoft Windows Messenger 5.0 Product Team would like to invite you to participate in their upcoming beta program for Windows Messenger 5.0. We are currently offering the Beta to participants who use Instant Messaging regularly, and will keep the Beta open until the end of June, 2003.
Our goal is to have a well targeted group of testers willing to actively participate and provide useful feedback to our development team. Please carefully consider your willingness and ability to test Windows Messenger 5.0 Beta. Your feedback will be critical to the success of our product. Regular and consistent participation throughout the program is expected.
Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers can now download Visual Studio .NET 2003, the most recent version of Microsoft's developer suite, which the company will launch in 2 weeks with Windows 2003. Which edition you can access depends on your subscription level: MSDN Professional subscribers get Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional, MSDN Enterprise subscribers get Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Developer, and MSDN Universal subscribers have access to Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Architect. In addition, versions of the MSDN Library April 2003 edition are also available for download; this three-CD-ROM image set provides the online help for Visual Studio .NET 2003.
A distinction that Microsoft is making between professional and standard versions of Office 2003 means that many customers may not get all the features they've been expecting, including broad support for Web services.
For more than a year, Microsoft has touted Office 2003's support for Extensible Markup Language (XML), a highly anticipated new feature of the productivity suite. But Microsoft now plans to fully deliver the feature only in the two high-end versions of the product, one of which will be available only to businesses subscribing to Microsoft's volume-licensing program.
Two other features also are similarly restricted: the document protection technology Windows Rights Management Services (RMS), and Excel List, a feature for improving analysis of data lists. Microsoft plans to deliver the three features only in the Enterprise and Professional versions of Office 2003, the company confirmed late Thursday.
Governments and multinational companies should take note of Microsoft's willingness to bend on prices to keep key accounts for its Windows operating system from wandering into the open-source Linux camp. The German Interior Ministry has signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to receive favorable conditions for both buying and leasing the U.S. company's software products, the ministry said Thursday in a statement. The agreement will save federal, state and local governments "much money," Interior Minister Otto Schily said in the statement.
Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against Lucent Technologies, asking that a court nullify a number of Lucent patents covering technology in some of the software giant's products.
The suit, filed on Tuesday in a federal court in San Diego, is the latest in struggle that has simmered over the past year over audio and video coding and other technologies patented by Lucent's research arm, Bell Laboratories. The Wall Street Journal first reported this story on Friday, noting that Microsoft was seeking to invalidate 13 Lucent patents.
Microsoft on Thursday slashed the price of its Xbox computer game console by 20 percent in Europe, its third price cut in just over a year as it tries to keep its slim hold on No. 2 market position. The company will sell Xbox units for 199 euros ($214.40) in continental Europe and 129 pounds ($201.90) in Britain, bringing its prices below market leader Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. Microsoft and Nintendo have been battling neck and neck for the No. 2 position across Europe, a fast growing market.
Microsoft now invests about a third of its $45 billion in cash through outside advisers, having begun moving away from in-house money management three years ago. Microsoft gave several million dollars in 2000 to Deutsche Bank to invest in a portfolio of stocks mimicking the S&P 500 Index, Microsoft treasurer Brent Callinicos said yesterday.
The company now invests about $15 billion with Deutsche Bank, Black Rock Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other managers. It also is buying foreign-government bonds. Callinicos said Microsoft has accumulated cash because there aren't many software companies to buy and the company is wary about making big acquisitions because of its antitrust settlement with the U.S. Justice Department.
Microsoft said on Wednesday it would allow hardware makers to modify its software used to control devices such as handheld computers and cash registers, marking a more flexible approach by a company famous for closely guarding such development. As Microsoft seeks renewed growth beyond its main market of software for personal computers, it has been promoting software for everything from servers to gaming consoles and devices. That in turn has propelled it into fiercer competition with Linux, the open-source operating system that can be freely copied and modified, analysts have said.
A Virginia man has been sentenced to five months in prison and fined $28,500 for selling imported chips that illegally modify Microsoft's Xbox video game console. David Rocci, of Blacksburg, Virginia, was sentenced late last week in federal court in Virginia after pleading guilty in December to one count of conspiracy to violate copyright laws under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was charged with importing and selling about 450 Enigmah "mod" chips, after-market processors designed to be attached to the Xbox's motherboard and circumvent its security measures. Rocci had faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $500,000.