WinInsider

Having taken the holidays to work out the specific terms of an injunction handed down last month, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are now scheduled to appear before a federal judge to detail their proposals. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore ordered Sun and Microsoft to appear in court Wednesday at 1:30 PST. Both Sun and Microsoft submitted written proposals on Monday, suggesting exactly which of Microsoft's software titles would have to carry or support Java, in what timeframe the order would be carried out and other details. On Tuesday, both sides will appear before the judge and debate the terms of the order. The judge's decision is expected "very soon," according to Sun.

Microsoft is working behind the scenes with leading antivirus software vendors to improve the way desktop security software works with its next major operating system, code-named Longhorn.

Under enormous pressure from customers, partners and competitors to clean up its security act, Microsoft plans to open up Longhorn through one hundred or so APIs that antivirus software developers could use to get a more direct path into the operating system and applications running on it. Longhorn will be only client desktop software,and according to Microsoft, Longhorn isn't expected out until late 2004 or early 2005.

Microsoft on Monday debuted a string of enhancements -- including the first Service Pack full of fixes -- to refresh its Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000, a suite of IT tools that provide event management, monitoring and alerting, reporting, and trend analysis to Windows shops. The MOM Service Pack 1 adds support for non-English servers and applications, adds clustering support for the MOM database, and lets users manage twice as many servers as before.

Stepping up efforts to compete with the Symbian operating system, Microsoft Corp. last week announced that two of its handheld platforms now support Sprint PCS Group's and Verizon Wireless Inc.'s high-speed wireless networks.

The Redmond, Wash., software maker said its Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphone operating systems now can run on CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) 1xRTT networks. Previously, the software ran only on GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) networks, which are supported by most European carriers and several carriers in the United States. However, Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, as do most U.S. cell phone subscribers.

SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. each announced new software Monday at the National Retail Federation Annual Convention and Expo in New York. SAP, of Waldorf, Germany, announced a new Web-based workforce management capability that will be part of its mySAP Retail offering. Meanwhile Microsoft announced a new BizTalk Toolkit for UCCnet connectivity. (UCCnet is a subsidiary of the Uniform Code Council Inc., the global standards organization that provides data registry and data synchronization services for product information.)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Beta 2, the first public beta release of Microsoft Corp.'s enterprise messaging platform, shows incremental, but useful, im-provements over its predecessor, Exchange 2000.

Exchange 2000 introduced AD (Active Directory), which requires customers upgrading from 5.5 to 2000 to change their entire messaging architecture. Exchange Server 2003 also uses AD, so a migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003 would be just as challenging, but there are no drastic implementation changes for sites moving from Exchange 2000 to the next version.

The judge told the groups -- the Software & Information Industry Association and the Computer & Communications Industry Association -- that they have no right to argue she erred in ruling that the settlement she approved Nov. 12 is "in the public interest" as required by law.

But late yesterday, the associations said they have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for permission to appeal both Saturday's ruling and that of Nov. 12.

Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler responded: "The one thing that's been clear throughout this process is how exhaustive the judge was in her evaluation of the settlement. We're focused now on implementing it."

Her opinion is more than 500 pages long and extremely detailed. Kollar-Kotelly's ruling is so closely reasoned that it is "virtually bulletproof," Bob Lande, an antitrust professor at the University of Baltimore, said in an earlier interview.

On Monday, Steve Case announced that was stepping down from his Chairman position at AOL Time Warner, casting further doubts on the future of the troubled company. Case came on board when Time Warner merged with his company, America Online, the leading Internet service provider. However, in the two years since the record-setting merger was consummated, the value of the combined companies has declined over $200 billion, enraging shareholders and board members. Previous to his announcement to step down, Case had faced months of internal pressure at the company, including an abortive attempt by board members to remove him from power last fall.

"Glanceable information" was the somewhat tortured description Bill Gates used during his keynote last week at the Consumer Electronics Show to explain the content we'll be looking at in the next generation of digital watches, PDAs and other consumer appliances. Using Microsoft's SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) gadgets, users will be able to glance at their watches and click through weather, sports scores and stock reports. While the devices are nifty, it seems to me that once again the device has outpaced the content. How many people really need to check on the weather a hundred times a day or watch their stocks on a minute-by-minute basis-or provide another avenue for spam messages?

As bleak as the technology sector looks, there's one bright spot: The Microsoft monopoly is dead. Perhaps "dead" is too strong a term. Statistically, Microsoft still rules - on the PC desktop, at least. But monopolies, which take years to build, collapse slowly. And historians seldom point toward market share as the meaningful indicator of a monopoly's demise.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say the Microsoft monopoly is in decline. It probably peaked in 1998, when Microsoft's remarkable Internet turnaround became complete - and, not coincidentally, the antitrust case launched.