Linux seller MandrakeSoft issued a plea for cash Friday, encouraging people to buy products, MandrakeClub memberships or company stock. The company, based in Paris but drawing much of its revenue from North America, needs $4 million to pay debts and cover expenses in order to attain profitability. It's the second time this year the company has sought help from its customers. "A very difficult time has arrived for us: We have a very big short-term cash issue," co-founder Gael Duval said in a statement.
MandrakeSoft isn't the only company to struggle with the business prospects of Linux, an open-source clone of the Unix operating system and one of several technologies once popular with investors. For example, the SCO Group changed its name to emphasize its Unix products, and Lineo, a maker of Linux for gadgets, this week was acquired under its new name Embedix by a Motorola unit.
Microsoft released on Friday software that allows users of competitor IBM's Lotus e-mail system to switch to the software giant's Outlook organizer program. Microsoft Outlook 2002 Connector lets Microsoft's software access e-mail on a Lotus Domino server, giving it a broader base of potential users for its nearly ubiquitous Office desktop productivity software. Microsoft, which dominates the desktop software market with its Windows operating system, is trying to accelerate slowing growth by diversifying its software in different environments and a wider range of devices.
Two computer industry trade groups have thrown their weight, and piles of legal paperwork, behind two states that continue to press Microsoft in its landmark antitrust bout with the U.S. government. The Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Software and Information Industry Association have joined the ongoing antitrust action. On Friday, they filed a motion with a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., to appeal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's approval of a settlement between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Before they can appeal, they must be granted the right to intervene in the case. The court will also hear a separate appeal by Virginia and Massachusetts in the four-year-old case.
Even as rumors persist about possible acquisitions in the developer tools market, Microsoft is gearing up for a major upgrade of Visual Studio .Net that is more enterprise-ready. The upgrade, code-named Everett, was officially named Visual Studio .Net 2003 last week. It is expected to ship in the same time frame as Windows .Net Server 2003, now due in April, the company said. Visual Studio. Net 2003 is expected to be touted at the VSLive developer's conference, to be held Feb. 9-14 in San Francisco. A future version, code-named Whidbey, is due in 2004. Visual Studio .Net 2003 is slated to include enterprise features useful for corporate developers, including support for mobile devices and enterprise databases.
In the Brazilian martial art capoeira, it can be hard to tell if the participants are fighting or dancing. Players cooperate and compete, and spend as much energy trying to impress the crowd and one-up each other as they do in combat. Microsoft's earlier response to open source was less subtle and more combative. But lately it looks like the relationship is evolving into a productive balance, more dance than fight.
Just last week Mono launched a new version of its software, based on the C# and CLI portions of .Net standard Microsoft submitted to ECMA and ISO. Microsoft published and opened just the APIs for .Net--what the software is supposed to do, not how it does it. Because .Net is a standard, both sides are able to avoid some of the pitfalls of arguing about source visibility. It is a major step forward from Microsoft's earlier stance, and it opens the door for others to build competing yet compatible implementations of the .Net API.
Smart Displays are advertised as being liberating, powerful, and convenient. We're not so sure if they really will deliver enough compelling attributes at an affordable price anytime soon. To understand Smart Display technology a bit better, think of Citrix or Windows Terminal Services architectures. In these models, a host system does all the processing and sends screen output to "thin-clients" with minimal compute power. It's like screen-scraping, GUI style.
The thin clients deliver a PC-like experience to the user, also handling keyboard and mouse inputs for host-based application and operating system navigation. Mira devices are Windows CE-based thin-clients and use 802.11b to connect back to your desktop PC. Touch screens, and optional USB keyboards round out the package.
A new breed of wireless PDA-phone is coming next year and Microsoft is expected to make the biggest waves. Intrinsyc Software Thursday said it has inked a licensing deal with the Redmond, Wash.-based behemoth for its next generation wireless handheld reference design MicroPDA. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company sells hardware reference platforms, engineering services for redesign, Embedded Web Services development environment, framework and runtime.
The new combination PDA-phone handset supports Microsoft's Windows CE .NET operating system, the Microsoft Smartphone 2002 software, and the Microsoft Windows Powered Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition software, as well as multiple microprocessors such as Intel's newest chip, the PXA250 XScale running at 400MHz as well as Intel's SA-1110 and Hitachi's SH3/SH4 microprocessors. The handset also supports Linux operating systems.
Apple Computer laid off 180 employees in its fourth fiscal quarter and said that it's facing increasing pressure in the education market, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Many of the job cuts resulted from the Mac maker's acquisition of software developer PowerSchool, according to a regulatory document filed with the SEC and released on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has struggled in the education market, it said. Sales to K-12 and university customers fell to 21 percent of its total revenue in fiscal 2002, down from 26 percent of revenue in fiscal 2001, the document said. Apple's fiscal year ends in September. Macintosh unit sales to the education market dropped 14 percent from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2002.
The European Union expects to wrap up its 3-year-old investigation into Microsoft early next year, the EU antitrust chief said in comments published Thursday. A preliminary ruling in the EU case had been expected by the end of this year, but EU officials were holding off while Microsoft's settlement with U.S. authorities was pending. A judge in Washington approved that settlement last month with only minor changes.
In comments made Tuesday at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, Competition Commissioner Mario Monti said it was now "realistic to expect a final conclusion in the first part of next year."
Ninety years ago, Theodore Vail - the president of AT&T - made a historic compromise. Vail believed that the telephone business needed to be run by one company - only then could it guarantee "communication with anyone that may possibly be wanted, at any time." So AT&T set about gobbling up competitors across the country, putting together the first nationwide phone network. For Vail's strategy to fly, though, there was one big hump to get over: the government, which was threatening AT&T with trust-busting on the one hand and nationalization on the other. So Vail cut a deal with the Justice Department, accepting regulation in exchange for sanctioned control of the telephone business.