Software giant Microsoft said on Friday that nearly all of its online gaming systems have sold out in about one week on retail shelves, totaling some 150,000 "Xbox Live" kits. Xbox Live is an online gaming service launched last week by Microsoft, a key component in the Redmond, Washington, company's $2 billion strategy to make its video game console the center of a networked home entertainment system.
"Virtually every Xbox Live Starter Kit at retail locations across the United States and Canada has sold out in less than one week," the company said in a statement. "(The kits) will be replenished throughout the holiday season." The $50 kit includes a one-year subscription to the service, demonstrations of two games and a voice communication kit that will allow game players to talk to each other through the company's global network.
Denmark--In the next 18 months Microsoft will replace BizTalk Server, Commerce Server and Content Management Server with a suite called "Jupiter." The software maker said here at the IT Forum that it would replace its three products in the e-business area with one suite, which will probably sell at a reduced price. The suite, code-named Jupiter, which will combine the features of BizTalk Server, CMS and Commerce Server, will ship around the end of 2003, and replace all three of the servers on the market today. "The current products will be broken down into components and put into Jupiter," said Dave Wascha, product manager for the new program. "We want to reduce the overlap and redundancy."
The June launch of a new initiative dubbed Palladium underscored Microsoft's security ambitions. Palladium is supposed to be a "trusted" computing system. Translation? An operating system that, unlike Windows, is designed from the ground up to enhance security and prevent hack attacks. As Gates and his CEO, Steve Ballmer, continue to throw resources behind the security effort, an increasing number of software analysts and industry figures believe Redmond may want to do more than simply make its own software more secure. They think Microsoft may also have its sights set on grabbing a share of a global market for security software hardware, services, and business continuity valued at $66 billion.
An operator of skateboard parks said it will open lounges featuring Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox video-game console in 11 locations tomorrow, a move that expands a promotional relationship between the two companies. Vans Inc., of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., said its home-theater environments, dubbed Xbox Lounges, will each include four 27-inch RCA flat-screen televisions, four Xbox consoles, 16 controllers, headsets and sofas. Microsoft paid an undisclosed sum to reach customers at the skateboard parks, a spokesman for Vans Inc. said. The software vendor is already a partner in the Vans Triple Crown Series athletic competition and sponsors competitions in skateboarding, motocross and surfing. Microsoft also entered into a loosely defined marketing relationship with Anheuser-Busch last month to promote Xbox.
For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world. But now, with the advent of huge Intel machines and the approaching release of a new version of Windows that will run on them, the company is changing its tune.
For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company's sales transaction database, Microsoft's preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a "cluster". But the coming .Net Server 2003 version of the Windows operating system, combined with the faster Intel servers on which it will run, has spurred Microsoft to start talking more seriously about large multiprocessor servers, known in the trade as "big iron."
"Some of the benchmarks out there are really quite phenomenal," Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates boasted Sunday during a speech at the Comdex Fall 2002 trade show here. "The number of processors built into systems is now building up to 32 and 64."
The Justice Department and Microsoft on Thursday picked two members of a three-person technical committee that will be responsible for enforcing the software giant's antitrust settlement. In a motion filed with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the Justice Department and nine states--Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin--requested that industry veteran Harry Saal be appointed to the committee. Microsoft requested the appointment of Franklin Fite, a former employee. In a four-page memorandum accompanying the request, the Justice Department made its case for why Kollar-Kotelly should appoint both men to the technical committee.
Unisys used 64-bit Itanium 2 processors and a 16-processor server to push the performance envelope of Windows-based systems on SAP's Sales and Distribution benchmark by 250 percent, the company announced this week. When compared against larger Unix/RISC systems, however, the result ranks 10th overall and is 17 percent as scalable as the best result.
The benchmark involved is the two-tier SAP SD benchmark, which is controlled by the ERP giant SAP. It is widely used as a proving ground for different hardware and software vendors. A major limitation is that unlike the Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmarks, the SAP benchmark doesn't show system costs.
Bill Gates isn't concerned about the money Microsoft's four loss-making units are losing--it's all part of the plan. Just days after revealing for the first time profit and loss figures for the software giant's seven units - also showing just how much of a cash cow the company's operating system and desktop applications units are - Gates defended the newer divisions.
He told the the Financial Times at this week's Comdex Fall trade event: "Of the businesses that we are investing in, (the losses are) all very intentional. It is not like we thought we'd be making money on Xbox at this point, or on business solutions, or mobile, or MSN."
Gates went on to say markets where Microsoft is losing money are mainly not yet mature enough to cover initial R&D and other investment. However, it is fair to assume Microsoft thinks that time will come.
A wireless alliance of companies led by Microsoft and Nokia is continuing to absorb smaller industry groups and expects to garner even more support by year's end. The Open Mobile Alliance, which promotes standard ways for cell phones to exchange data, announced it recently added nonprofit group Mobile Wireless Internet Forum to its organization. Members of the forum include Intel, Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard.
The Mobile Games Interoperability Forum (MGIF) also intends to join the alliance, said Mike Wehrs, director of technology and standards for Microsoft's mobility group. Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Siemens formed MGIF to promote standards for offering games over wireless phones. Game maker THQ is among the 17 members of MGIF.
Microsoft, with its upcoming "Yukon" and 64-bit "Liberty" variants of its SQL Server database, is looking to oust Unix as the platform of choice for the enterprise, a Microsoft official stressed during a keynote speech Wednesday at the Professional Association for SQL Server Summit conference here.
Mangione noted the 709,000 transactions per minute score reached by SQL Server on a cluster of systems, based on the Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark. "In a short time, we'll start touching that on a single machine," he said. SQL Server on Windows will surpass "proprietary" Unix servers on a single machine, Mangione said. "The investments we are making in this space, we are absolutely committed to," said Mangione. The company is committed to running databases with terabytes of information, he said.