Microsoft is looking at new ways to make its relatively unpopular Licensing 6 and Software Assurance volume licensing agreements more beneficial to the customers most negatively impacted: small and medium-size businesses. Some options under discussion within the Redmond, Wash., software developer include additional support for customers as well as free training, the level and extent of which would depend on the actual agreement.
"Talking to customers, particularly those small-to-medium-size businesses, we have found that they want some level of training included as part of their licensing agreement, while our enterprise customers have said they want manageability of their environment," said Mike Sinneck, Microsoft's corporate vice president of worldwide services, in a recent interview with eWeek. "We are committed to adding additional value to Software Assurance for all customers."
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's recent endorsement of much of the agreement reached between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft Corp. lifts many clouds from the company's future. Now Microsoft, under the leadership of CEO Steve Ballmer, is free to turn its attention to such initiatives as acquisitions, .Net, shared source code and a more componentized Windows.
Ballmer addressed these issues and others, including why Office 11 requires Windows XP, in an interview at Microsoft headquarters, in Redmond, Wash., with eWeek's Executive Managing Editor/Features Jeff Moad, Technology Editor Peter Coffee and Senior Editor Peter Galli.
eWeek: How will the favorable ruling change Microsoft's strategy? Will it allow you to be more aggressive in acquisitions, for example?
Ballmer: We have essentially been working on compliance for over a year-given that the resolution from the judge largely looks like the consent decree. We have been very serious about compliance, and you should expect us to continue to be. However, we are going to do new things to enable new scenarios for our customers, and that will take us into new areas-that could be acquisition or could be incubation.
Put yourself in Steve Ballmer's shoes. With antitrust suits looming, you've been forced to ask yourself what a variety of judges and prosecutors would think about every major move you might make. But, following a settlement with the Department of Justice, the legal clouds have begun to lift, and you're freer now to act than any time in the last four years. So what do you do? You'd probably start looking around for new markets to conquer and, with $40 billion or so in the bank, maybe a few acquisitions. And that's exactly what Microsoft's CEO is doing.
"I put out a memo where we talked about our mission, where we talked about the fact that we're going to do new things," said Ballmer in an interview with eWeek editors and reporters at Microsoft headquarters here this month. "We were quite explicit that we need to enable new scenarios for our customers, which take us into new areas which could be [through] acquisition, could be [through] incubation," Ballmer said. Microsoft is looking at possible acquisitions in the areas of storage, security, and management and developer tools.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates declared on Sunday that the best in computing was yet to come, despite the gloomy state of the technology industry, with a new breed of intelligent products set to debut in the near future. Gates, delivering the opening keynote address at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, revealed that Microsoft has been working to develop new software and hardware designs that let people harness the power of computers without being tied to a desk.
Although the pen-based Tablet PC, a multimedia personal computer, and software for mobile devices have been part of Microsoft's recent drive to get its software into users' hands and pockets, Gates said the software giant was starting to target more mundane everyday objects, such as the alarm clock.
Microsoft is set to unveil on Sunday new software intended as an electronic replacement for the standard paper notebook. OneNote, a new PC application expected to be introduced during a keynote address by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, is the Redmond, Wash.-based company's attempt to make it easy to transcribe quick notes, preserve URLs and easily find information on your hard drive.
Conceptually, OneNote, expected to debut by the middle of next year, is similar to word processing, but it is intended for quick handling of short notes as opposed to long multipart documents, Microsoft said. "Think of it as an electronic notebook," said John Vail, a director of product management at Microsoft. OneNote is primarily designed to be used with keyboards on desktops and notebooks. However, the application will also be compatible with Tablet PC, which already comes with a notepad for taking handwriting notes.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the world's wealthiest man, said Tuesday he will pass a sizeable portion of his wealth to charity and not his three children. "I don't think it's constructive to grow up having billions of dollars," Gates said of his children at a news conference while on a four-day trip to India. "The idea that I will take a sizeable portion of my fortune and have them inherit that, I don't think that would be to society's benefit or to their benefit. I've spoken out about this before...my philosophy of giving back my wealth to society."
Gates said Monday he will give $100 million to battle the spread of HIV/AIDS in India, which has the world's second-largest number of cases of the deadly disease. The donation -- the largest single-country grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- is aimed at protecting truck drivers, migrant workers and other vulnerable groups from the disease.
In a regulatory filing Thursday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft for the first time provided financial results for each of seven recently formed business units, revealing operating losses in four segments, including the unit that produces its Xbox video console.
The disclosures appear to support the idea that in order to tap new and potentially lucrative markets for products such as enterprise software applications and video games, Microsoft is prepared to incur significant near-term losses to build up those new businesses, financial analysts said. The analysts cautioned against reading too much into losses reported by some of the divisions, and they said that at first glance the filing appeared to offer no great surprises.
After a year of work on the Trustworthy Computing initiative, Microsoft Corp. executives say they are pleased with the progress the company has made thus far, but acknowledge that they've only just scratched the surface of what needs to be done.
Although it didn't get much attention until Bill Gates wrote his famous call-to-arms memo on the subject in January, Microsoft Chief Technology Editor Craig Mundie first articulated the company's thoughts on improving hardware and software security at its Trusted Computing 2001 Forum last November in Silicon Valley. At the time, Mundie talked about a broad plan that would need industry and governmental cooperation to implement.
Microsoft said its senior vice president of human resources, Deborah Willingham, will retire. Willingham, who joined Microsoft in 1993 and became head of HR two years ago, oversaw the growth of Microsoft's worldwide head count to 50,000 from 30,000 since 2000.
While Willingham is the highest-ranking woman on Microsoft's payroll, the company recently hired Maggie Wilderotter, who after the Thanksgiving holiday will be senior vice president of business strategy. The company is looking both internally and externally to replace Willingham, who will leave in February to pursue other interests that include travel, charity work and corporate board memberships.
The first release candidate of DirectX 9.0 was made available for download Wednesday, an unexpected move that marks the first time Microsoft has opened a DirectX beta for public scrutiny. DirectX 9.0 RC0 follows the Beta 3 release that was issued to testers last month. Version 9.0 improves security and performance, and includes many new features across all technologies that can be accessed by applications using the DirectX 9.0 APIs, according to Microsoft. The new release adds a high-level shader language -- based on C -- designed to simplify development.
ATI has already released beta "CATALYST" drivers to take advantage of the technologies included with DirectX 9.0. "The combination of DirectX 9.0 and ATI's driver, CATALYST Beta Release Candidate 0, will provide incredible levels of gaming and cinematic realism," said Dean Lester, Microsoft's General Manager Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies. ATI has created four demos to showcase the new capabilities.