China Unicom said on Friday its parent, China's number-two wireless operator China United Telecommunications (Unicom Group), would team up with Microsoft on CDMA wireless data services in China. China Unicom said in a statement Unicom Group and Microsoft's China unit signed a memorandum on a strategic partnership in Beijing on Friday.
"The presence of Microsoft enriches the CDMA industrial value chain, helps strengthen the R&D competence of Unicom Group in the CDMA data business, and provides strong technical support to the CDMA 1X data service which will soon be launched through the Unicom Group network," the Hong Kong-listed company said.
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates said on Friday the software giant had signed a deal to give the Chinese government access to its source code, which lies at the heart of its Windows operating system. The world's largest software firm, fighting competition from the free "open-source" Linux platform, will distribute its jealously-guarded technology to China under an initiative to promote software security and to woo the world's most populous country.
"The government source program covers 100 percent of the source code of Windows, every part of Windows," Gates told a news conference of eager Chinese reporters, who even asked for his autograph.
Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, is the richest person in the world for the sixth consecutive year, even after his net worth fell more than $10 billion, Forbes magazine reported yesterday. Of 11 Northwest billionaires that made Forbes' list of the richest people, four owe their fortunes to the success of the world's largest software maker. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was listed as the fourth-richest person in the world, with $20.1 billion, while Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ranked 16th, with a net worth of $11.1 billion. Charles Simonyi, who retired from Microsoft last year to start his own company, barely made the list with a net worth of $1 billion dollars. He ranked number 427.
There was no penguin suit this year. The tough times facing Sun Microsystems called for something a little more serious when Scott McNealy addressed financial analysts here this week. McNealy, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Sun, informed a critical analyst community that Sun will not change by mimicking the strategies of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. This message was a far cry from that of last year's conference, when McNealy took the stage in a penguin suit, looking like the Linux mascot Tux, and explained why Sun had indeed decided to go in the direction of rivals and ship Intel -based servers with Linux on top.
Sun has been rocked by a tough hardware market and the evaporation of key telecommunications and network service provider customers. Revenue has tumbled from the $18.25 billion reported in 2001 down to the point where analysts are predicting a 2003 mark under $12 billion. Phrases such as "All time high" have been replaced with "Returns to profitability" in company earnings statements.
The next time you see Microsoft software developers showing off their latest invention, the question to ask is whether their work will be in Longhorn. It's not an inside joke among the coding cowboys. Longhorn is the code name for a radically new version of Windows designed to be a foundation of Microsoft's business in the coming decade. More than 2,000 of the company's engineers are rushing to finish the project by late 2004.
"It's a phenomenal step forward and very ambitious," Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said of Longhorn. It's "my big-time focus now."
Microsoft and Electronic Arts are separately exploring the possibility of buying all or part of Japanese videogame maker Sega, the Asian Wall Street Journal said on Friday. Sega said earlier this month that it would merge with pinball-style 'pachinko' game machine maker Sammy, abandoning plans to restructure on its own and turning to financially sound Sammy for help.
The paper said either U.S. company could emerge as Sega's White Knight, pulling the company away from a merger plan that appears rife with difficulties and internal opposition. Microsoft has asked at least one U.S. investment bank to investigate ways it could buy all or part of Sega, while EA in recent weeks has approached Japanese game makers about launching a joint bid for Sega, the paper said. Acquiring Sega could give Microsoft a strong boost in Japan, where a dearth of Xbox games that appeal to Japanese consumers has left a vast stock of unsold consoles.
Microsoft plans to move further into the business applications software market this spring with new programs targeted at midsized companies. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker plans to launch business "portal" software, which will let workers access data and applications using a Web browser, according to Microsoft executives.
Microsoft Business Solutions division will demonstrate two new products, Business Portal and Human Resources Management (HRM) Self-Service Suite, at its annual Convergence conference in Orlando, Fla., next month, said Mark Jensen, group product manager at Microsoft. The two products will become generally available in the United States by June, he said.
Like the new Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2003, for example. This software, code-named Iris, is based on the .Net framework and SQL technologies and will debut with the Office suite later this year. Microsoft has planned its so-called iWave push of Office 2003, SharePoint 2 and InfoPath (also known as XDocs) for June.
The new Business Contact Manager in the Outlook client will import data from the popular Act contact manager, Intuit's QuickBooks and Microsoft's own Access and Excel applications, according to documentation posted first to MSDN and then to the WinBeta site. OneNote 2003, the note-taking application demonstrated at Comdex last fall, is also included in the beta.
A top European Commission competition official sparred with a lawyer for software giant Microsoft on Thursday on the issue of how to keep markets open without dampening innovation. The Commission has accused Microsoft of competing unfairly, and the U.S. courts have found it holds and has abused a durable monopoly.
The lawyer, who said he was giving his own views rather than those of his company, questioned an antitrust doctrine which makes companies share with rivals a facility deemed essential to a market. The lawyer said in the discussion at a small workshop at a conference of corporate counsels in Barcelona that the rivals should instead invent an alternative.
Microsoft yesterday brought together 400 researchers from the company's five labs -- some as far away as Cambridge, England, and Beijing -- to help the company's other employees understand what the scientists are up to.
The idea behind TechFest, now in its third year, is to spark new product ideas and enhance existing products by giving developers, marketers and other employees demonstrations, lectures and hands-on experience with some of the most abstruse computer research happening anywhere, Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said.