A new research report forecasts that devices using Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, a version of Windows for small electronics devices, could begin to outsell Windows PCs by the end of the decade.
The report by eTForecasts of Buffalo Grove, Ill., suggests that Windows CE devices, which include cell phones, PDAs and consumer electronics, have the potential to outsell Windows PCs, by 2010. But Windows CE will have a long way to go between now and then. While manufacturers will sell between 14 million and 17 million Windows CE devices worldwide this year, Windows PC shipments will equal 135 million to 138 million units, worldwide, the firm predicts. Windows CE devices will take until about 2008 to catch up. At that time, both Windows PC and Windows CE device shipments will near the 200 million unit mark, the report says. By 2010, eTForecasts predicts Windows CE device shipments will accelerate to about 300 million to 340 million, while Windows PCs will edge up to between 215 million and 225 million units worldwide.
Microsoft said on Sunday it is working to make its digital video and audio format a standard for professional broadcasters, one of the software giant's latest efforts to tap into markets beyond the personal computer.
Microsoft is unveiling partnerships with Avid Technology, the Associated Press and other video production-related companies this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas to promote its Windows Media 9 Series video and audio format, the the world's largest software maker said.
Microsoft said on Monday that it will release a new version of its software that allows corporate workers to collaborate on projects and share information online.
As part of its push to promote Microsoft Office as a one-stop shop for corporate tasks and communications, the world's largest software maker has been working on software and services to allow users to work on the same documents, exchange information more efficiently and coordinate activities. For example, a group of people working on the same document can track changes and exchange tips without having to exchange multiple versions via e-mail.
Microsoft is closing in on exceeding a $1 billion cost-savings goal. Issued by CEO Steve Ballmer nearly two years ago, the companywide challenge called for the savings to be achieved within 24 months. The software giant is on track: It has chalked up savings of more than $825 million in 20 months. This achievement would not have been possible without the help of worldwide procurement led by Don Jones.
When Jones took the position of general manager, worldwide procurement, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., late in 2000, the group was focused mainly on improving efficiency of the company's transaction processes. With the help of IT, procurement developed a set of online tools for use by employees to buy indirect goods and services such as PCs, marketing and advertising and travel. Use of one tool, MS Market, helped to lower PO costs to $5, saving about $7.3 million annually.
AOL Time Warner has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drop a requirement that the company make its Instant Messaging (IM) interoperable with competing IM products. You might recall that the requirement was a condition of America Online's so-called mega-merger with Time Warner over two years ago; since that time, the company has made absolutely no attempt to interoperate its IM products with competitors such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. These competitors argued at the time that a combined AOL Time Warner would unfairly dominate the emerging IM market.
Flaws in IBM's DB2 database software were responsible for a chain of glitches that turned a routine hardware repair into a weeklong operational crisis, Danske Bank said Thursday in a report on an outage it suffered in March. The Copenhagen-based bank, Denmark 's largest, was replacing a defective electrical unit in an IBM RVA (Ramac Virtual Array) disk storage system used for DB2 data when an electrical outage in the system halted operations at one of the bank's two IT centers. Several hours later, the system was repaired and restarted. But the next day, March 11, the bank observed problems with batch runs of collected data being processed at the affected center, in Ejby.
Like any techie I do my best to keep up with all the latest news on the web. Slashdot, Wired, CNET, OSNews, etc.; I visit them all just about everyday. And frankly as time goes on, the same theme is happening on most of the tech forums: 'Let's all jump on the bash Microsoft wagon.' It's getting old, just like when everyone was on the bash IBM wagon. Is it just me or is there some kind of book or website that the bashers all read from? It just seems that no matter what tech forum I go into, the same things are brought up every time.
Let me show a few examples:
1. Microsoft sucks or M$ sucks ? ok, and?
2. Microsoft is bundling or buying everything to stifle competition.
3. And the opposite, Microsoft isn't adding enough features to IE, Windows, etc.
4. Windows has so many security leaks, it's not funny. I bet Linux has few too but of course, not as many.
5. Windows crashes all the time.
The pending launch of Windows Server 2003 will be a milestone not only for Microsoft, but for the other half of Wintel, too. It's been eight years since Intel got into the server market and two years since it shipped a 64-bit processor, the Itanium. On April 24, a 64-bit version of Windows that takes advantage of Intel's 64-bit design will become generally available.
For Intel, "that's a pretty big deal," says Lisa Graf, the company's director of enterprise processor marketing. It means Windows-on-Intel servers can finally claim a degree of parity with their Unix-on-RISC competition. That's significant because Intel-based servers account for more than 80% of units that ship, but slightly less than half the revenue, analysts say. Intel wants to swing more of the high-end market in its direction. "We're very much focused on continuing to scale up," Graf says.
IBM and Microsoft on Friday expect to submit a jointly built XQuery test suite to the World Wide Web Consortium. If the consortium working group approves the submission, software developers could run their XQuery implementations on the suite for testing and quality assurance purposes. A proposed method of dealing with unstructured, nonrelational data in XML format, XQuery is an analog to the popular SQL query language in the structured data world.
A federal appeals court that is hearing Microsoft's appeal in the Java case suggested yesterday that it will overturn the preliminary injunction that would have required the company to bundle Sun's Java technology in Windows XP immediately. Well, maybe "suggested" isn't a strong enough word. "I don't think the district judge had a clue," said U.S. Circuit Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, one of the three judges who heard arguments from Microsoft and Sun this week. When a Sun attorney tried to argue his case, he was quickly cut off by the judge, who spared no chance to get a few digs in at Judge Frederick J. Motz, the judge that issued the original ruling. "It seems to me the District Court missed it all," he said. So does this mean Motz's ruling will be tossed aside? Not necessarily; certainly, in the past we've been fooled by the language used by various judges working Microsoft court cases. But Motz's ruling is so controversial I can't imagine that it's going to withstand any scrutiny.