Microsoft yesterday promoted Will Poole, its executive in charge of digital media, to a newly created position of senior vice president of its Windows client business.
The move is part of a reorganization that seems to happen about once a year at Microsoft, although this year's shuffling is not as extensive as in the past.
In his new role, Poole will have extensive oversight of a range of Microsoft operations, including development of Windows in desktops and laptops, the Windows eHome division and Microsoft's digital media player. He will report to Brian Valentine, senior vice president of the Windows division.
Raindance Communications Inc.'s chief executive called the Wednesday drop in its stock price a "knee-jerk reaction" to news that Microsoft planned to expand its Web-conferencing business. Shares of the Louisville-based Web-conferencing company closed down 28 percent Wednesday, after Microsoft Corp. said it would buy Web-conferencing provider Place- Ware Inc. for an undisclosed price. Raindance shares closed down 87 cents at $2.22. Shares of another Web-conferencing company, San Jose, Calif.-based WebEx fell even further on Wednesday, closing down $3.25 at $12.20. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Place-Ware appear to be fashioning their product and services for sale to smaller enterprises, he said.
The Windows Product Team at Microsoft has sent invitations to beta test the PC Satisfaction Trial, a Web service that will be part of an upcoming customer research program. "The intent of the trial will be to see how much more satisfied Windows customers are when they feel confident about the security of their PC and the safety of their data and personal information," the team wrote in an e-mail.
"We are looking for people with higher than average technical skill to install and use a pre-release version of the PC Satisfaction Trial service on internet-connected PCs running Windows XP in homes and small businesses."
Microsoft asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to shelve a lower court order that would force it to start incorporating Sun Java programming language in its Windows operating system. The world's largest software company filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. seeking a stay of the Java "must-carry" order until the court considers its challenge of the order.
In the motion, Microsoft's lawyers asked for an expedited hearing of the lower-court ruling, which they called "extreme and unprecedented." "The injunction will inflict serious harm on Microsoft and Windows, Microsoft's flagship product, that is distributed to many millions of customers throughout the world," Microsoft told the appeals court.
Cisco Systems said Wednesday that along with partner Microsoft it had begun offering businesses a new blueprint for installing office systems based on Windows 2000 and hardware from both companies. The blueprint, part of Microsoft's larger Microsoft Systems Architecture initiative, consists of several pieces of Cisco equipment, including Cisco's 6500 series of high-end switches and its PIX 500 series of firewalls for securing networks from hackers, according to a Cisco representative.
Microsoft unveiled the MSA initiative in July 2002. The program calls for the creation of a slew of new guides for businesses. Other guides developed thus far include one for managing software patches throughout a business and another for installing new desktop applications companywide.
In the war between the world's two biggest platforms, a weakness in one J2ME specification may be opening a window of opportunity for Microsoft that could have a chilling effect on the heat in Java's brew. For evidence of this, look no further than the devices that run the embedded form of something from Microsoft-- PocketPC, Windows CE, or SmartPhone. From one device to the next, Microsoft is doing something that Sun, as well as the device-based counterparts in the Java Community Process (JCP), has thus far failed to do: take almost complete control of the hardware design.
During the summer of 1997, the top dog of the desktop PC crowd was a 300MHz Pentium II processor. Now, five years later, Intel's second-generation PXA250 ("XScale" core) is delivering 200MHz, 300MHz, and 400MHz CPUs to Pocket PC PDAs--literally putting yesterday's desktop PC in your pocket.
On the other side of town, Handspring, the company founded by the original designers of the Palm handheld organizer, has released its Treo line of PDAs. Both the Treo 90, a run-of-the-mill organizer, and the Treo 300 are part of a new PDA genre called "communicators." These two combo phone/organizers run on the Motorola 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor--not much compared to Intel's hyperactive clockwork, although it does double the speed of the original 16MHz Handspring Visor of three years ago.
AS the European Union wraps up its antitrust investigation into Microsoft, competitors fear that the European Commission may issue a ruling that fails to prevent future abuses by the software maker.
One of the main issues in the case that Microsoft and the Commission are farthest apart on is the bundling of Media Player in the Windows operating system. The Commission, which among other things oversees EU competition regulation, believes that this form of bundling gives Media Player an unfair advantage over competitors. Microsoft has said it is unwilling to take the video and audio player out of Windows.
Microsoft competitors want the European competition regulator to word its ruling in such a way that it applies to the bundling of other middleware products.
After a series of fits and starts, Microsoft CRM is ready to roll, the company said Tuesday. Version 1.0 of the long-awaited product went to manufacturing Tuesday. A 1.1 international version, with support for seven languages is slated to ship in the second half of this year. Integration for Great Plains applications will ship later this quarter, and integration with the rest of Microsoft's Navision products will come later this quarter, Microsoft said. Partners have been waiting a long time for this product, which had been promised by the end of 2002. CRN first reported on Microsoft's grand CRM game plan two years ago.
Microsoft will soon make a final presentation to seek a settlement with the European Commission of its probe into the U.S. software giant, a person close to the situation said on Wednesday. The source said EU's executive had not yet reached a conclusion on allegations of abuse of a dominant market position which it has been investigating against Microsoft. The Commission was expected to take into account Microsoft's presentation and recent conditions imposed on the company by a U.S. court in its decision, the source said. The Commission may either reach a settlement with Microsoft, as the U.S. Justice Department has done, or impose a remedy on the company.