Hit a midlife crisis, buy a new sports car, or so the old saw goes. So what kind of purchases might rev up a middle-aged company? Microsoft, now in its 28th year and the world's most valuable company, started 2003 with the purchase of two small, private Silicon Valley companies. Many Microsoft watchers predict other acquisitions could follow as the company uses its $40 billion cash hoard to reach for new areas of growth, especially at a time when it's likely to find technology assets at bargain prices.
For several years, the Redmond, Wash., company has recognized the need to branch out into new territory to respond to slowing sales growth of its two crown jewels, the Windows operating system and the Office suite of productivity software. Microsoft can no longer depend as heavily on those products as the PC becomes just one element in a much larger digital world.
When Microsoft delivers 64-bit SQL Server to manufacturing next week, it's not just enterprises that will reap the benefits. Many partners said they see interest from the midmarket as well. The database, code-named Liberty and officially called SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), is slated for release to manufacturing next week, along with Windows Server 2003, the operating system it will require. Both are expected to be available next month. The official launch is set for April 24. Microsoft touts the fact that SQL Server takes advantage of the latest 64-bit microprocessors as proof that it can compete with high-end Oracle databases on Unix.
Shipments of Intel Xeon processors in the channel are on track to double this year as Microsoft readies its Windows Server 2003, according to one of Intel's top channel executives. Steve Dallman, director of Intel channel sales and marketing, also said the chip giant is getting closer to shipping Pentium 4 processors at 4GHz. Dallman addressed a gathering of Intel solution providers and systems builders at the company's annual Intel Solutions Summit here. "There is nothing between us and 4GHz but months," Dallman said.
Dallman addressed a gathering of Intel solution providers and systems builders at the company's annual Intel Solutions Summit. Noting the difficult economic environment the industry has seen over the past two years, Dallman provided an upbeat assessment of Intel's channel's health and opportunities. During the conference, he and other executives plan to roll out the company's channel and technology road map for the coming year.
A newly leaked build of Longhorn, the next Windows desktop version, shows little progress over previous builds I've evaluated, suggesting that the product is still many months away from fruition. Longhorn build 4008 mysteriously showed up on USENET last Friday, sending enthusiasts scrambling to download the pre-release code. Delivered in ISO form, the Longhorn build can upgrade an existing Windows XP installation or be installed from scratch in its own partition.
One advance in build 4008 is a new setup routine that takes less than 20 minutes to install the product, including a single reboot, which is a major improvement over installing Windows 2000 or XP, which generally takes 45 minutes to an hour. It's unclear what Microsoft has changed to achieve such a speedy installation time, but many of the previously configurable options are also missing.
A federal court has ordered Microsoft to produce more than 300 boxes of evidence to support its claims in a trademark suit against software startup Lindows.com, pushing back the jury trial in the case from April until December. The delay, announced by Lindows on Monday, comes as a welcome relief for the San Diego, Calif.-based company, which said in a statement that it is grateful for the extra time to prepare for the case. Microsoft originally filed suit against Lindows for trademark infringement in December of 2001. Despite efforts to obtain a preliminary injunction against the niche software maker, Microsoft's requests have been denied. Now the jury trial, originally scheduled for April 7, 2003, has been pushed back to Dec. 1.
For years, Microsoft critics have maintained that the software giant's SQL Server database can't measure up in the enterprise against rival offerings from Oracle and IBM. Think again. In our cover story this week, CRN Test Center Technical Editor Mario Morejon pits the major databases against one another in a request for proposal (RFP) price/performance battle that looks at the licensing costs and the performance of the top database products in both the enterprise and small-business segments. The results may surprise you.
Bottom line: Microsoft is making a big move in the enterprise database arena. And the company is set to crank it up another notch: CRN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow reports in a news story on page 5 that Microsoft is poised to deliver its 64-bit SQL Server to manufacturing next week.
Microsoft's MSN said its e-mail services had blocked some incoming messages from rival Internet service providers earlier this week, after their networks were mistakenly banned as sources of junk mail. The Redmond, Wash., company, which has nearly 120 million e-mail customers through its Hotmail and MSN Internet services, confirmed Friday it had wrongly placed a group of Internet protocol addresses from AOL Time Warner's RoadRunner broadband service and EarthLink on its "blocklist" of known spammers whose mail should be barred from customer in-boxes. Once notified of the error by the two ISPs, MSN moved the IP addresses "over to a safe list immediately," according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.
Microsoft is widely expected to tweak its Licensing 6.0 volume licensing program Saturday in an effort to make the program more appealing to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) which rejected the plan when it went into effect in August 2002.
Gartner Group analyst Alvin Park said Microsoft began training its channel partners in the new licensing option, dubbed Open Value, on Nov. 21, 2002. He said Microsoft will make the option available in the U.S. and Canada on March 1, 2003. A similar program launched in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in September 2002.
Microsoft unveiled a test version this week of threedegrees -- an instant messaging product aimed at 13- to 24-year-olds that lets them hang out online together -- as part of the software company's efforts to target the set that grew up with the Web. The new product, available for free on the Internet, is an effort to get a firm foothold in the market targeting a tech-savvy demographic that finds the Internet second nature for shopping, socializing and finding information.
Threedegress is the first application from Microsoft's "NetGen" group, which has been working for about 18 months to find what services will ring truest with the young people who have "internalized the Internet."
Finally the mainstream press--which has historically over-inflated the value, usage, and potential of Linux--is owning up to some facts that should be fairly obvious: Linux is more vulnerable, less secure, and less capable than Windows. But honestly, how could it be otherwise? Windows has been in development for decades, scales from the smallest handheld devices up to the largest servers in the world, and has an unbelievably dedicated and complex development structure, as I documented in my Windows Server 2003 Road to Gold series on the SuperSite for Windows. What Linux has had going for it is a lot of anecdotal stories about uptime and stability, and not much else. While Linux is certainly a capable and worthy operating system for many situations, it's time to take stock of reality. In one indicative report, published by the Aberdeen Group, we discover that, "Contrary to popular misperception, Microsoft does not have the worst track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Also contrary to popular wisdom, Unix- and Linux-based systems are just as vulnerable to viruses, Trojan horses, and worms." The report wasn't sponsored by Microsoft, either, so get your mouse pointer off the Reply button and listen up: It is backed, rather, by publicly available data from CERT, and the report actually concludes that Microsoft's lowered vulnerability rate last year is the direct result of the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative. There'll be more of this kind of information coming in the months ahead, I guarantee it. And let me restate for the record, there's nothing wrong with Linux per se. But blanket statements about the open source rival besting Windows in the categories that matter most to enterprises are simply ludicrous.