WinInsider

A year ago, an anonymous donor offered to pay $200,000 to any Open Source programmers who could figure out how to install Linux on Microsoft's Xbox video game system within a year. With the deadline reached, and only one of two goals accomplished, the donor has extended the Xbox Linux Project deadline another year and revealed his identity. Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows.com, and the man responsible for Microsoft's legal problems regarding its trademark for Windows, is that donor.

Microsoft Longhorn, a project to remake the lucrative Windows software, is behind schedule and faces challenges that haunted another unsuccessful product almost 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Longhorn, intended to confront competitors such as the Linux operating system, may resemble "Cairo," which the company didn't introduce successfully. Longhorn may require the expensive rewriting of programs that run on top of Windows, including Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat reader, the Journal said.

Microsoft executives say the system won't be ready until late 2004 or early 2005, although Microsoft group Vice President Jim Allchin won't predict when Longhorn will be completed, the newspaper said.

Microsoft plans to translate its Office software into Norway's second official language after most high schools threatened a boycott, the British Broadcasting Corp. said, without citing anyone. The company didn't initially respond to calls to translate its Office software into Norway's second language, which is spoken by fewer than 400,000 people on a daily basis, the BBC reported. Schoolchildren in Norway must learn New Norwegian, or Nynorsk, and a certain number of government workers have to use the language, created in the late 1800s as an alternative to the Danish-influenced written form, the BBC said.

So what's the always amazing Microsoft going to do in 2003? Heck if I know, but here are a few of my best guesses:

• Longhorn betas will fly fast and furious next year - but they will be lacking a number of features we thought were supposed to be in there.
• The server division surreptitiously will push back a bunch of products slated for 2003 to 2004.
• Office 11 will mark the end of feature bloat-and the start of app bloat.
• MSCRM Release 1.0 will be ridiculed by Microsoft competitors (a bunch of whom the product could force out of business by next year); doubted by its resellers; and purchased only by those who don't know any better.

Microsoft's Management Business Group is set to start the new year off with a bang. In early January, the group is slated to roll out a refresh for the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) platform. Included in the refresh will be Service Pack 1 (SP1) updates and fixes, management pack updates, a new software development kit and a new resource kit. MOM is software that is designed to aid customers in providing "enterprise-class" application and sever management, via event management, proactive monitoring and alerting, reporting and trend analysis.

Microsoft hopes its Windows .Net Server 2003 operating system will be the product that finally gets users of its 6-year-old Windows NT Server 4.0 system to upgrade en masse. Microsoft is counting on this upgrade cycle to drive revenue growth and to advance its .Net business strategy. But that's not likely to happen when .Net Server 2003 is released in April, analysts say. Many NT 4 users are comfortable with NT and don't see a reason to switch.

But sales of the new server software could have a domino effect. It could help Microsoft sell new versions of its SQL Server database, Visual Studio development tools and other products, Gillen says. Windows .Net Server also includes ways to enable Web services - a means of easily sharing data among different software programs and systems using Internet standards. Microsoft has branded its Web services efforts .Net, pronounced "dot net."

WinBeta.org has found some more Office 11 screenshots...

While browsing MSDN, we stumbled upon an article called Whats new for Office 11 Developers, while the article itself is very interesting, it does include some interesting screenshots of Office 11 post beta 1, which includes some nice looking new toolbar icons and an interesting new context menu called "MSDN". The article also includes a few shots of Xdocs, the newest addition to the office family designed to make XML forms easier to create and manage.

Xdocs: 1 2
Word: 1 2 3
Excel: 1 2
Access: 1 2

The latest Pentium 4 processor not only passes another megahertz milestone by running at 3.06 GHz, it also introduces Intel's new hyperthreading technology to the desktop. Hyperthreading enables one processor to act like two. As a result, it can simultaneously tackle multiple applications (or a single application that has multiple threads), put idle CPU cycles to use, and boost system performance by up to 25 percent--all without requiring specially written applications, according to Intel.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Exclusive PC World tests on three of the first systems to use the new processor, however, show that hyperthreading's benefits largely are application- or even task-specific. For example, on the office applications that most people use--such as Microsoft's Word and Excel--hyperthreading had a neutral or slightly negative impact. And on tests specifically designed to expose the benefits of hyperthreading, many improvements were too slight to be detectable by the average user, except with select filters in Adobe Photoshop, with various video and photo programs such as Adobe Premiere and Roxio VideoWave, and on certain multitasking tests.

There is no question that Microsoft Windows, the name of the dominant personal computer operating system, is one of the leading brands in the world. Today, Windows is the face of computing for nearly 400 million people worldwide - the software that determines the look and basic operations of more than 90 per cent of PCs.

But success, money and monopoly, it seems, do not put even so familiar a name as Microsoft Windows beyond challenge. An upstart company, Lindows.com, is trying to persuade the United States District Court in Seattle to invalidate Microsoft's trademark on Windows. At issue is the level of legal protection that should, or should not, be accorded to an ordinary word that Microsoft adopted as its own: windows.

In a well-publicized memo either earlier this year or sometime during last, (I can't remember exactly which, I admit), executives at Microsoft admitted they considered Linux and open source software to be the biggest threat to their dominance and continued expansion into a variety of markets, from the home desktop and business office to the emerging TabletPC and notebook market.

After watching Microsoft closely for the last eighteen months or so, I've got to disagree. Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other.