Microsoft announced Friday that its corporate privacy officer, Richard Purcell, has resigned and that the company will be moving security strategist Scott Charney to head the day-to-day management of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. After 10 years at the company, where he started in the database group, Purcell will leave at the end of March "to explore new challenges," said the company in a statement.
"Richard's leadership has helped bring a dedicated and integrated focus on privacy to every part of the company," Microsoft said. "We are sorry to see him go, but wish him the best in his new endeavors."
Microsoft CRM this week is at about the same stage it was a month ago: on the cusp of shipping. Last week, Microsoft was desperately trying to get the software to manufacturing but at press time hadn't succeeded, sources said. Most solution providers close to the situation had Release Candidate 3 in hand at the beginning of last week, and the story out of Redmond shifted day to day. While partners are eager to have what could be called final code, others say patience is a virtue.
"In the context of a release that was two-plus years in the making, a day or two is pretty trivial," said Giga Information Group analyst Erin Kinikin.
Some people will dismiss the report as Microsoft-sponsored hot air, but the raw data is there for everyone to see in CERT's Advisories and Incident Notes, giving legitimacy to The Aberdeen Group's conclusion that open-source operating systems in general, the new Mac OS X, and critical security programs themselves, aren't as safe as many proponents suggest.
The underlying data is worth a close look. No new Windows platform virus or Trojan CERT advisories were issued in the period of January 2002 through October 2002. CERT's confirmed vulnerabilities list shows that the threat level is growing faster for Linux/Unix platforms than for Windows. This could be a statistical anomaly due to the much larger number of Linux/Unix versions (although there are actually fewer versions available now, as there has been consolidation in both the Linux and Unix markets in recent years). So the number of threats is growing while the number of Linux/Unix versions is shrinking.
Microsoft plans to screen four independent movies at the Sundance Film Festival with its Windows Media 9 Series software, as part of the company's ongoing efforts to warm Hollywood to its technology. The software giant's media playback technology will be used with four films, "Masked and Anonymous," "The Maldonado Miracle," "A Foreign Affair," and "Milk and Honey."
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates described that launch as another step in the company's vision to deliver digital media to a host of PC-like devices in the home. Hollywood, however, has remained noncommittal and has continued to support Windows Media rivals: RealNetworks and Apple Computer's QuickTime.
Microsoft's stock split and first-ever dividend weren't enough to overcome Wall Street's apprehension about the software giant's reduced projections for 2003. The company's shares fell $2.74, or almost 5 percent, to $52.60 in Friday morning trading. Microsoft did give investors something to cheer about Thursday, with the announcement of the 2-for-1 stock split and dividend. The dividend will be paid out annually at 16 cents a share, on a presplit basis. The split is the ninth since Microsoft went public in 1986. The company expects shareholders to receive their shares around Feb. 14.
But the Redmond, Wash.-based company then also tempered projections for the remainder of fiscal 2003, which ends June 30. Microsoft's trimming back on earnings comes as the company prepares to launch, during the first half of the calendar year, four major products aimed at enterprise customers.
A Microsoft executive said Friday that the company is on track to meet Xbox sales targets for the current fiscal year. Mitch Koch, vice president of retail sales for Microsoft's games division, said the company has sold 8 million Xbox units to date. With the holiday sales season over, Microsoft expects to sell about a million more by the end of the company's fiscal year June 30.
Nintendo recently lowered sales forecasts for its GameCube console; worldwide sales are expected to be between 10 million and 12 million by March 30, the end of the company's fiscal year, boosted by strong sales in its home territory of Japan. The Xbox has been nearly invisible in Japan, selling slightly more than 300,000 units since its debut there last March.
A year after Bill Gates called for Microsoft to make its products more "trustworthy," executives are touting myriad initiatives as proof of the software giant's new resolve.
The company has spent millions to train staff in privacy concerns and secure programming, while building new tools and processes to help create reliable software.
"We said that Trustworthy Computing is a 10-year project, sort of like (President) Kennedy sending people to the moon," said Scott Charney, chief security strategist for Microsoft. "We're (only) a year into it. We want to get to a point where the end user says, I trust this technology, my privacy is protected, and it is reliable."
During his Fall COMDEX 2002 keynote address, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates briefly unveiled the company's Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) initiative, in which everyday devices such as alarm clocks, wristwatches, key chains, and even refrigerator magnets are made more intelligent through a new hardware and software platform that is small enough to scale down to the sizes required by such devices. The COMDEX keynote used a smart alarm clock as an example. But by the time the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) rolled around in January 2003, Microsoft had much more to say about SPOT and the types of devices we can expect to see, beginning late this year. This preview will discuss those details and my impressions of using a prototype smart wristwatch.
A legal tussle over a schedule for paying attorneys' fees owed to two states in the antitrust case has ended in Microsoft's favor. The company is still liable to Massachusetts and West Virginia, but U.S. District Judge Coilleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed with Microsoft that a decision should happen sooner than later.
In a four-page ruling on Wednesday, Kollar-Kotelly denied the states' attempt to delay their request for about $2.3 million in attorneys' fees until their appeal of the antitrust settlement--which they claim was too weak--is complete. The judge said: "The court finds that it is generally prudent to proceed with the attorneys' fees phase of a case when the issues are fresh in the minds of the litigants and the court."
Microsoft on Thursday announced its first-ever dividend and a two-for-one stock split as it posted quarterly earnings that edged past Wall Street expectations. But the No. 1 software company also said that revenues for the current quarter and the full-fiscal year ending in June would be below Wall Street estimates amid an ongoing slump in information technology spending. In a surprise move, Microsoft also said it would start paying dividends for the first time since going public in 1986, declaring an annual dividend of 16 cents per share before the split.