"Sun and Oracle are companies that make good products," acknowledged Microsoft Productivity and Business Services Group Vice President Jeff Raikes midway through our interview. Complimentary comments about a competitor aren't what I'm accustomed to hearing from most tech executives. But Raikes chose to focus on what gives Microsoft unique differentiation: cost. Indeed, he was well prepared to respond to the long standing "you get what you pay for" rhetoric of Microsoft critics.
Microsoft often delivers a mea culpa for not making its platform easy enough for mere mortals to use. In recent Comdex keynotes, Chairman Bill Gates has labeled computers "too hard to set up" and "laborious" and opined that "it's got to be easier." Meanwhile, citing Moore's Law, Gates extols the improvements in price/performance. When I read between the lines, there is a bit of admission that Intel has done its job while the software has lagged.
Microsoft is making available some intellectual capital to service partners to fuel adoption of its management servers and Windows 2000. The software giant Tuesday unveiled with Avanade the release of Microsoft Solutions for Management, a series of prescriptive architectures that enable optimal performance of Microsoft's Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operation Manager in a data center.
The blueprints will apply to Microsoft Operation Manager, Systems Management Server 2.0 and the next version of Systems Management Server, code-named Topaz and slated to ship in September 2003, executives said.
Delays in the release of Windows .NET Server aren't the only changes that Microsoft is making to its calendar. Due to popular demand, the retirement dates of two older versions of Windows also are being pushed back. In response to what a spokesman calls "customer concerns," Microsoft announced in October that it will continue to support Windows NT Server 4.0 until the end of next year, without charging its "extended" support fee. Additionally, the company has stretched support for Windows 2000 Professional until the end of 2004.
The Web's leading standards group approved on Tuesday two XML encryption specifications, a move that promises a boost for the development of secure Web services. The two specs, XML Encryption Syntax and Processing and Decryption Transform for XML Signature, will enable Web pages using Extensible Markup Language to encrypt parts of a document being exchanged between Web sites, the World Wide Web Consortium said.
While other methods exist for encrypting XML documents, the W3C's specifications make it possible to encrypt selected sections or elements of a document--for instance, a credit card number entered in an XML form.
To get into the spirit of the holidays, Microsoft has released special "Fun Packs" for Windows XP featuring winter-themed skins, sounds and templates. The three Fun Packs integrate with Windows Media Player 9 Series and Movie Maker 2 betas, along with Internet Explorer 6. Windows Media Player 9 Series Winter Fun Pack adds new Ginger Man and Ice skins, winter visualizations, and holiday themed Auto Playlists that use the Smart Jukebox feature.
Digital Video with Windows Movie Maker 2 Winter Fun Pack features a collection of wintery sound effects, holiday music, titles, video titles, and cut scenes. The eight holiday tunes include "Jingle Bells" and "Silent Night."
PeopleSoft and Microsoft on Monday each introduced new applications designed to help businesses sell to and service customers, the companies said in separate announcements. As reported, PeopleSoft will ship a new release of its CRM (customer relationship management) applications at the end of the month, as part of its new PeopleSoft CRM 8.8 product. The release includes more than 150 new features, all aimed at streamlining customer service, sales, and marketing activities.
Among the additions are tools for personalized marketing, customer segmentation and computer-guided sales, the company said. PeopleSoft also said it beefed up the interoperability and data-analysis capabilities in the product. In addition, it introduced versions designed specifically for companies in the insurance, energy and computer industries.
High-end Intel servers took two steps forward Monday as Hewlett-Packard demonstrated an Itanium version of its top-end server and Unisys charted new territory for servers using the Xeon processor. HP has been the most vocal advocate of Intel's Itanium processor, the foundation of an HP plan to unify its server lines. Companies such as now-extinct Sequent have tried to build high-end Intel servers, the systems haven't caught on widely with banks, retail stores and other customers with heavyweight computing jobs. That's changing with the arrival of more powerful processors such as Itanium and of less crash-prone versions of Windows--Windows 2000 and its successor, .Net Server 2003, due for release in April 2003.
Microsoft on Tuesday released blueprints designed to help technology managers install Windows more efficiently and at a lower cost. The software titan issued five guides that businesses can use for a variety of tasks, including patch management or installing new desktop applications companywide. The Redmond, Wash.-based company calls the suite of guides Microsoft Solutions for Management.
Michael Emanuel, senior product manager for Microsoft's Management Group, said the guides will help large businesses with scenarios they might encounter on an ongoing basis. Truncated versions of the guides are free, while customized versions with additional services are available from systems integrator Avanade or through Microsoft Consulting.
Recently, a study conducted by IDC and funded by Microsoft found that (gasp!), over a five-year period, Windows had a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux.
Certainly there are configuration issues, but having worked with both Linux and Windows, my experience over the last two years has clearly shown that Linux takes longer to configure and troubleshoot than Windows.
The quality of these modifications differ from company to company--and not just the quality of the coding, but especially the quality of documentation, if it even exists. This can make fixing an ailing Linux box time-consuming--and time costs money, especially when you're paying a Linux guru who charges twice as much as an MCSE pro.
In the five years that Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have been fighting over Java, most developers have let their code do the talking. The fate of Java on the desktop is again in the hands of a judge, and developers will likely continue to use Microsoft's .Net or Sun's Java regardless of the decision.
"It will not affect us one bit," said Stephen Forte, chief technology officer at Corzen Inc., an online market research company in New York. "No developer is going to let a judge decide what technology to use. For starters, the judge has no idea what he is talking about. .Net predominantly is a server technology. "As a developer, if we need the current version of the JVM [Java virtual machine], we just download it. Who cares if it comes bundled or not?" Forte said.