Continuing efforts to woo academia, Microsoft Thursday said it will release Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic Edition to U.S. schools in conjunction with professional versions of the development environment. Additionally, the source code for a number of environment's components will be made available under Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative through an Academic Tools Source License.
The company also announced the 25 recipients of its 2003 Microsoft Research (MSR) University Relations Innovation Excellence research grants. Microsoft selected the 25 recipients from 152 submissions, and will award $3.5 million to the chosen projects.
About 18 months ago, the software titan set Tammy Savage to the task of creating a new software division that would develop software for the group of teenagers and young adults that grew up using the Internet.
Right away, 33-year-old Savage, who is general manager for Microsoft's NetGen division, realized this group, ranging in age between 13 and 24, used radically different means of socializing, finding information or even buying and selling goods than any other generation before it. They met friends online in chat rooms as easily as local malls or scoured eBay for hot deals rather than hitting the thrift store or discount store down the block.
Microsoft posted the second beta of Office 2003 to its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site on Wednesday, only to pull it a few hours later. "A copy of the second beta was inadvertently posted yesterday. It was subsequently pulled because it is not ready for customers," a Microsoft spokeswoman in Europe said Thursday. "We expect the beta 2 to ship in March." Microsoft won't specify how many MSDN subscribers downloaded the beta, saying only that it was "a very low number."
With the posting, Microsoft also confirmed Office 2003 as the name for the successor to Office XP, dropping the Office 11 code name. IDG News Service first reported the name change last week.
Not many things number 10 billion. But after Microsoft's stock split Tuesday, that's how many shares are available in the world's No. 1 software maker. While stock splits aren't unusual, the sheer pile of shares created by Microsoft's is. Following the 2-for-1 split, Microsoft has enough stock to give nearly two shares to every man, woman and child on Earth. If you were to keep all of Microsoft's shares within the USA's borders, the per-person allotment jumps to nearly 38.
Stock splits don't affect a company's value. Microsoft's number of shares might have doubled, but its share price also fell in half. Microsoft closed Tuesday at $24.96 vs. $48.30 Friday (markets were closed Monday for Presidents Day). Its market value was close to $260 billion before and after the split.
Avaya on Wednesday unveiled a pact with Microsoft's Business Solutions division to license Microsoft CRM and integrate it with Avaya's IP Office telephony product. IP Office is Avaya's channel-only hardware and software communications offering for small and mid-size customers that combines call processing with voicemail, contact center and data networking capabilities.
With Microsoft CRM integration, IP Office can provide enterprise-class functionality to smaller customers by linking incoming calls to customer service or sales representatives with detailed customer history, said Brandt Olson, director of business development for the SMB division of Avaya.
The software landscape has changed so much in the past couple of years that the terms "bundling" and "Chinese Wall" are no longer the loaded words they once were. But the shift doesn't mean Microsoft is retreating from its campaign to get customers to deploy all Microsoft products, all the time, across all devices. Far from it.
As will become clearer on April 24 when it launches its next Windows release, Microsoft is building everything but the kitchen sink into Windows Server 2003. (Microsoft isn't the only operating-system vendor doing this. Sun Microsystems - which once cried foul over Microsoft's server-bundling strategy - is currently on a nearly identical path with Solaris.)
The "best" product doesn't always win since, given advantages of predatory pricing and clever marketing strategy, "good enough" is almost always good enough to carry the day. I'm talking, of course, about Microsoft, its software and its business practices, and if you're a fan of BeOS, OS/2 or another innovative software product that ended up mangled on the side of The Road Ahead, you've seen these sentiments expressed before and you've probably expressed them yourself.
This time, however, it's Microsoft that's facing a pricing and distribution model that it can't seem to match, and it's Microsoft that's beginning to have trouble explaining just how it adds enough value to keep users from spending their tech dollars elsewhere.
As the Desktop Linux Summit gets underway in San Diego - on the heels of last month's enterprise-oriented LinuxWorld - it appears that Microsoft is swimming the wrong way against the tide of history. Not that history hasn't been kind to Redmond. Just two decades ago, Microsoft led the rebel alliance that turned computing on its head by introducing the notion of a commodity-priced operating system running on separate commodity-priced hardware. Now, Microsoft is the Empire to be toppled. The operating system is becoming a layer of code that exists, for all intents and purposes, in the public domain. And Microsoft's responses to this shift - and threat to its core business - have been tepid and misguided.
Accenture has developed a hosted service it hopes will give new meaning to rapid application development. The consulting giant next week will make available its Web Service Platform, which has been in pilot testing since last year. The service is designed to accelerate the building of customized business applications using .Net, Microsoft's name for software used to build and deploy Web services. Web services is a programming method that relies on XML-based standards to share data and processes between applications.
Microsoft is looking to burn spammers targeting users of its Hotmail e-mail service with a lawsuit filed in a California federal court last week. The suit goes after unnamed defendants accused of harvesting e-mail addresses from its Hotmail servers with the intention of spamming subscribers. The "John Doe" suit allows the company to conduct discovery in the case, and issue subpoenas as part of the investigative process of the trial, a Microsoft representative said Wednesday.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose last Thursday, represents the software giant's latest volley against spammers, which it is targeting through both the courtroom and U.S. Congress.