Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect and co-founder, preached an upbeat vision of technology in a keynote speech here Friday evening. Speaking at the Indian Institute of Technology's 50th Anniversary Celebration gathering, Gates said people within this decade will be doing more things digitally.
"The vision that we have is the digital decade," Gates said.
In the year 2000 the number of people who used digital approaches was quite small, with tasks such as dealing with photos, taking notes, and organizing music all being done without computer technology, Gates said.
"Most things were not done on a digital basis. Our belief is by the end of this decade, that will change," Gates said.
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are expanding their partnership on NAS (network attached storage) products in an effort to boost sales and improve products, the companies said Monday.
The two-and-a-half year-old partnership for Windows Powered NAS products will now also include joint training of engineers and aligned sales and marketing teams. Also, sales partners will get access to implementation blueprints and case studies, said Zane Adam, director of product management and marketing at Microsoft's Enterprise Storage division.
Microsoft and rival Sun delivered a plan to a federal judge on Monday laying out how Microsoft will obey a court order to distribute Sun's Java programming language in its Windows operating system, representatives of the companies said. After a weekend of negotiations, lawyers for both sides agreed on a joint proposal for U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore that outlines how Microsoft should comply with an order by the judge that Microsoft include Sun's Java in Windows within 120 days.
Neither Poulson nor Desler would comment on the details of the injunction until it is formally entered by the judge. Desler said Microsoft will file an appeal of the injunction with the U.S. appeals court in Richmond soon after the order is entered.
Though it's small by Colossus of Redmond standards, the cash payout says a lot about how Gates & Co. sees itself these days. At Microsoft's annual meetings each November, one shareholder question is as predictable as the fall that rains in Redmond: When will the software giant issue a dividend? Even as Microsoft's cash holdings ballooned to $40 billion, Chairman William H. Gates and CEO Steven A. Ballmer could always be counted on to recite the standard company line: The board routinely considers the matter but wants to keep the cash for contingencies. Yet on Jan. 16, the board changed its mind. Microsoft will split its stock on Jan. 27 and pay an 8-cent per share annual dividend on Mar. 7 to shareholders of record as of Feb. 21.
Think the technology designed to send news reports to your wristwatch is new? It was tested by Atari 20 years ago. The technology behind Microsoft's futuristic "smart objects" has humbler origins than one might expect. It's used to pipe music into elevators and was tested by Atari two decades ago as a way of sending new video games to its consoles, a developer of the technology said this week.
Microsoft shed light on its Smart Personal Object Technology, or SPOT, at the Consumer Electronics Show. It uses FM radio networks to deliver a slow but steady stream of data to devices like wristwatches and fridge magnets, sending information such as sports scores, weather reports, and stock quotes, or even short text messages. Three leading watchmakers plan to sell SPOT-enabled wristwatches by the end of the year, Microsoft said this week.
Software giant Microsoft is giving the Russian government access to its secret source code for Windows operating systems as part of a global effort to improve information security, company officials said Monday. "This is a very big step," said Olga Dergunova, managing director of Microsoft's Moscow office. The company will reveal the "architecture and principles" behind Windows, she said, in what analysts say is an effort to keep governments from switching to cheaper alternatives.
Russia is the first country to sign on to Microsoft's "Government Security Program" - which allows countries to review the secret code and evaluate the software's ability to withstand attacks.
The world of corporate computing has been divided into two hostile camps for some time. On one side: Microsoft and companies such as customer-relationship software leader Siebel Systems that have lined up behind Microsoft's .Net technology for building Web-based applications. On the other: The rival Java technology team, headed by Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Oracle. On Jan. 16, German software giant SAP came down solidly in both camps.
Rather than pick sides, SAP, the leader in the market for business finance, supply-chain, and human-resources applications has decided to straddle the great divide. Its entire array of software is being tooled to work with products using either .Net or Java. To help SAP afford the high cost of living in both worlds, and as a measure of how much the biggest rivals like the idea, both IBM and Microsoft are chipping in. Says SAP Co-CEO Hasso Plattner: "We're the only company that cooperates with both camps."
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday painted a sober picture of the global economy and its own financial outlook, saying there are a number of assumptions and risks that investors need to be aware of. In a teleconference with the media and analysts on Thursday to present the Redmond, Wash., company's second-quarter financial results, John Connors, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said Microsoft has built at least seven important assumptions and risks into its financial forecast.
These include building a sales pipeline for fiscal 2003 and beyond. While Microsoft will continue to add significant resources to its field and partner-led sales effort for the rest of the year, it expects this effort to only yield results in fiscal 2004.
Microsoft's decision to pay its first dividend may prompt other computer-related companies to change course and dip into their cash holdings to reward shareholders, investors said.
Cisco Systems Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Dell Computer Corp. and Oracle Corp. are among companies that may declare dividends after Thursday's announcement by the world's largest software maker, fund managers said. Microsoft, with $43 billion in cash and short-term investments, is in the best position among its peers to defy the computer industry's custom of not paying dividends in order to plow cash back into research and development or share buybacks.
Microsoft announced on Saturday the introduction of new digital rights software aimed at helping music labels control unauthorized copying of CDs, one of the biggest thorns in the ailing industry's side. Stung by the common practice of consumers copying, or "burning," new versions of a store-bought CD onto recordable CDs, music companies have invested heavily in copy-protection technologies that have mainly backfired or annoyed customers. For example, most copy-proof CDs are designed so that they cannot be played on a PC, but often this prevents playback on portable devices and car stereos too.