Despite several hours of arguments and testimony from attorneys and witnesses, the judge hearing the preliminary injunction arguments in the Sun Microsystems Inc. versus Microsoft Corp. antitrust case managed to win the day at closing as much as he had at the start of the day.
Sun went first with its case and said it would call three to four witnesses, but only got through two Tuesday-and at that the day ended close to 8 p.m. At the outset of the day, Sun's attorneys said the company would get through all of its witnesses in one day. Testimony will resume Wednesday morning with Dennis Carlton, an economist witness for Sun.
A Microsoft attorney Tuesday alleged that Sun Microsystems' antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft is a ploy aimed at allowing Sun to maintain its competitive advantage with the Java software platform.
"Before .Net was conceived and before development began, Java was alone in [its] market," said Microsoft Attorney David Talchin in his opening statement before Judge J. Frederick Motz in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. In fact, "Microsoft's entry into this market is a procompetitive act," Talchin said.
What do we need in a new operating system? The next version of the Microsoft Windows desktop is supposed to answer that question. Codenamed "Longhorn," the software is expected sometime in 2004 (probably later than earlier); Microsoft won't yet commit to a specific target date. But that schedule's already looking ambitious.
Microsoft has been very quiet about what precisely Longhorn will be about. I think, based on insider discussions, I know some of what it's supposed to include. But the official silence is a cause for concern. But we know enough to say that Longhorn is already a small failure; the possibility of a big failure looms.
Enterprises need to decide how long they can keep a client OS based on Microsoft's support cycles, their risk averseness for certain users and certain applications, and how current they wish to keep or how aggressive they are in adopting new applications or new versions of applications.
Critical users, critical applications, and enterprises that plan on updating their applications on a regular basis should be off an old OS and on the new one before Microsoft-assisted support ends. Enterprises that are more static in the applications they run and can withstand some risk for certain user populations can stay on an OS until after Microsoft support ends. Managers should understand business unit requirements to make sure their client-OS infrastructure is ready for the next application revision they will require, in order to avoid opportunity costs caused by running an older OS.
So it's a shame that Microsoft's Shared Source program has gotten so little serious ink. From the enterprise customer standpoint, Shared Source achieves almost all the important objectives of open source. The only real problem with it is that Microsoft doesn't use it widely enough.
Microsoft uses this kind of license, as opposed to the GNU GPL or BSD licenses, because they want to protect their intellectual property. It wants to be able to control the development of the product and it wants to be able to make money off the use of it. This seems perfect normal, downright American to me, but there are a lot of people out there who just don't believe in software intellectual property rights, and this is the attitude you have to have in order to object to Shared Source. The things you're not allowed to do are mostly the things that deny Microsoft the control over and ability to profit from its intellectual property. Ask yourself how many companies make profits selling GPL software and whether this is good for the industry.
How do you muscle your way into a club whose members include the world's top cell phone makers when nobody wants you? It's a tall order, even if you are Microsoft. The U.S. company is trying hard, though. On Wednesday, Microsoft was touting the virtues of its Smartphone operating system for use in a new generation of high-tech mobile phones at one of Asia's biggest telecoms trade shows. Since its launch in October, the system called Smartphone has faced an uphill battle, largely because five of the world's top cell phone makers support their own competing system, known as Symbian.
Linux distribution maker Lindows.com announced yesterday that it has submitted its final legal filing challenging the validity of Microsoft's trademark on the term "Windows." The lawsuit was filed after Microsoft sued Lindows.com for its use of the term "Lindows," which the software giant says is too close to Windows and likely to confuse consumers. A US District Court in Seattle will now determine whether "Windows" is a valid trademark.
Microsoft will post Release Candidate 2 of Windows .NET Server 2003 this week, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. RC2 will probably be the last widely distributed test version of the server operating system before it is released to manufacturing sometime in the first quarter of 2003. General availability of Windows .NET Server 2003 is scheduled for April.
Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Windows NET Server, says the length of the RC2 cycle will depend on customer feedback, but company officials have faith that the product is nearly ready to go. "Going into the holidays, there's always the chance that testing will slow down," O'Brien says. "I believe that the cycle between this and getting to an RTM is going to be fairly short. In order to meet our goal of having product in channel in April, we've got to hit the [RTM] mark in Q1 without any blips."
U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Motz questioned whether the preliminary injunction requested by Sun -- forcing Microsoft to carry Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on every copy of Windows and Internet Explorer -- would give Sun an unfair competitive advantage.
"I came into this asking ... if you've got the better product why do you need the remedy?" Motz asked. He noted that U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had "vehemently" denied a similar request in her antitrust settlement ruling for the U.S. government's case on Nov. 1.
Tulchin cited a Sun internal document saying that Java could reach the majority of PCs if the company spent $4 million a year with OEMs, a small amount of money for a company that had about $12.5 billion in sales in its last fiscal year.
Intel's sagging 64-bit microprocessor, the Itanium, will get a much needed speed boost in 2003, when the third generation version of the chip debuts at 1.5 GHz. The chip, code-named Madison, is physically similar to today's Itanium 2 design, but features smaller internal componentry and 6 MB of built-in cache, twice as much as the Itanium 2, which will further improve performance. The speed boost couldn't come soon enough, however: The Itanium line is flailing in the market, thanks largely to the long life time and scalability of the company's 32-bit x86 chips, which continue to improve each year.