WinInsider

Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates said on Sunday he did not expect a big pickup soon in technology spending, widely seen as a necessary ingredient for a sustained U.S. recovery. "This economy is fairly flat -- technology spending, there's no big up-tick," Gates told reporters at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. "I'm optimistic about scientific advance and technology, and if you take (that) over a long period I think we'll see good economies. But in the next two or three years, I neither see anything notable, nor do I consider myself someone who could make predictions," he added.

Hoping to get its fingers deeper into Microsoft's touted .NET platform, Borland Software Monday became the first to license the Windows .NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK). Meta Group Senior Program Director Thomas Murphy said he sees the move as a good one for Borland, and one that demonstrates the competitive cooperation the firm has enjoyed with Microsoft. Borland offers Delphi Studio, which supports such Microsoft scripts as Visual Basic and C#, as a competing product to Microsoft's Visual Studio software tools development portfolio. Because of this, Murphy said Monday's announcement means developers will have more options.

"This shows the growing support for .NET," Murphy told internetnews.com. "Borland recognized this as a market opportunity and said 'we can make money here.' A large number of people that use Delphi will be able to move Delphi into the .NET world."

The Sapphire worm that hit servers running Microsoft SQL this weekend was a wake-up call for anyone who thought the Internet had become a safer place following increased attention by corporate and government leaders. The small but malicious program rapidly exploited a six-month-old flaw in Microsoft SQL servers, underscoring a dirty secret in the IT industry: software bugs are common and administrators are slow to fix even widely publicized problems, said Johannes Ullrich, director of the security information site Incidents.org. "Companies should have been ready for (the worm)," he said. "That patch should have been applied--it's six months old now."

Microsoft is stepping up its Trustworthy Computing efforts as it readies the release of Windows Server 2003-a product viewed by company executives and customers alike as a crucial test of the security program's effectiveness. The server, due in April, is the first product from the Redmond, Wash., developer to be designed and built from the ground up since the implementation of the Trustworthy Computing campaign. As such, it will be an early indicator of the success or failure of the company's efforts to train developers in writing secure code.

Saying that medical science has solved the "easy" problems of the rich world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Sunday announced a $200 million fund aimed at luring researchers into finding original cures for the poor world's ailments. The $200 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be used to set up the "Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative" which will dole out money in grants of up to $20 million each to scientists around the world. "By accelerating research to overcome scientific obstacles in AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, millions of lives could be saved," Gates told reporters in a telephone interview.

2002 was a good year for Microsoft --­ certainly more so than 2001. And the optimism continues, with a distinctly Microsoft-friendly administration in power in the US that has as good as declared itself uninterested in pursuing the company through the courts for any corporate misdeeds it may or may not have committed in the past. Some have interpreted Microsoft's decision to pay shareholders a dividend for the first time as a token of appreciation designed to add credibility to the Bush administration's tax cuts for investors.

Traffic on the Internet slowed dramatically for hours early Saturday, the effects of a fast-spreading, virus-like infection that overwhelmed the world's digital pipelines and broadly interfered with Web browsing and delivery of e-mail. Sites monitoring the health of the Internet reported significant slowdowns globally, although recovery efforts appeared to be succeeding.

Most home users did not need to take any protective measures. Experts said the attack bore remarkable similarities to the "Code Red" virus that struck the Internet during the summer of 2001.

The virus-like attack, which began about 12:30 a.m. EST, sought out vulnerable computers on the Internet to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp., called "SQL Server 2000." But the attacking software was scanning for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively - sending out thousands of probes a second - that it saturated many Internet data pipelines.

The attack sought to exploit a software flaw discovered by researchers in July 2002 that permits hackers to seize control of corporate database servers. Microsoft deemed the flaw to be "critical" and offered a free repairing patch, but it was impossible to know how many computer administrators applied the fix.

As Microsoft gets ready to launch its .Net wave of servers, including Windows Server 2003--slated for launch in April--Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates late Thursday sent an e-mail to millions of Microsoft customers, partners and employees with an update on the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative and hinted that the Palladium security software-hardware architecture will address many security issues of the future. Here is the full text of Gates' memo:

As we increasingly rely on the Internet to communicate and conduct business, a secure computing platform has never been more important. Along with the vast benefits of increased connectivity, new security risks have emerged on a scale that few in our industry fully anticipated.

Microsoft has dropped the code name of its controversial security technology, Palladium, in favor of this buzzword-bloated tongue twister: "next-generation secure computing base." On Friday, the company said that the name Palladium had become tarnished by controversy surrounding some elements of Microsoft's security push. In additional, it faced a potential legal battle with a small firm over the Palladium name.

"The official story--and it's true--is that we intended to change the name for a long time," said Mario Juarez, product manager for Microsoft's Windows Trusted Platform Technologies Group. "The fact that it was something that got a lot of attention and gave rise to a lot of misunderstanding" was also a factor, he said.

Software giant Microsoft is hiring 1,500 sales staff to promote its programs directly to corporate customers, Chief Financial Officer John Connors said on Friday. "If you think about how will we sell in volume to both large and small accounts, we are basically increasing our investment in our enterprise sales force pretty substantially in this fiscal year," Connors told investors at a meeting in New York monitored by Webcast.

The world' No. 1 software group, which has traditionally sold its software through resellers, original equipment manufacturers and retailers, said last July that it would boost its staffing by 10 percent to a total of about 55,000 employees by June of 2003, the end of Microsoft's current fiscal year.