Shortly after one of Microsoft's key partners unceremoniously dumped its software for one made by Nokia, the company said it remains a player in the combination cell-phone and PDA smartphone market.
A Microsoft manager said he was "baffled" by Sendo's decision to switch and Sendo's inability "to cross the finish line," by bringing the product to market. Microsoft added that since Java and MMS support can be built on top of the Microsoft smartphone platform, the switch to Nokia's software made no sense. "Nokia is trying to be all things to all people: a software provider to its hardware competitors, a handset company and portal for end users, an infrastructure company for carriers, etcetera," said Ed Suwanjindar, product manager of Microsoft's mobile devices division. "At the end of the day, Nokia is a competitor to Sendo and every one of its Series 60 licensees in the hardware arena. We're not."
Technology buffs of a certain age can remember when a ''home entertainment center'' was 8 feet long, built of cheap, heavy wood, and featured an LP turntable, AM-FM radio and a 19-inch picture tube - wide-screen TV by the standards of 1959. People seem nostalgic for every aspect of that bygone era, except for those old home entertainment centers, with their Leave-It-To-Beaver aesthetics and dismal ''hi-fi'' sound. But there's a lot to be said for the idea of an all-in-one home entertainment center, so much so that now the computer industry is embracing the idea, with a gentle nudge from Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft has released a software update to correct connection problems with network gear it unveiled in mid-September. The fix could resolve problems in the company's 802.11b wireless, or Wi-Fi, and Ethernet hubs that either dropped connections with local computers or with Internet service providers. Users started reporting problems soon after the network gear appeared in stores around Oct. 1.
The glitches are a bit of a black eye for Microsoft, as they reflect upon the company's expansion into an important new hardware category--home-networking gear. Microsoft unveiled 10 wired and wireless networking products, including hubs and USB adapters, in mid-September. Rival Linksys has a commanding lead in the category, where analysts note that Microsoft's network gear is priced higher than competing products after mail-in rebates.
Microsoft Corp.'s top security executive on Monday called on the government to take more responsibility for the security and integrity of the nation's critical infrastructure, saying that leaving the task to vendors and market forces is a mistake. "The problem is, we have delegated security to the markets, and the markets don't do that," said Scott Charney, Microsoft's chief security strategist, during his keynote speech at the Computer Security Institute Conference here. "What we have to think about is, how much security does the market get you?"
C# is a modern and innovative programming language. To that end, Microsoft plans to deliver several new features in C# that will greatly improve programmer productivity and the .NET development experience. At OOPSLA in November 2002, C# creator Anders Hejlsberg announced several potential new features for the next major release of the C# language, including:
- Generics
- Iterators
- Anonymous methods
- Partial types
Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. will ratchet up their ongoing database battle with each announcing new and upgraded features that hit at the other's strengths. At the OracleWorld conference in San Francisco this week, Oracle will introduce real-time features for its Collaboration Suite, ease-of-use enhancements to its EM (Enterprise Manager) database management software and a new tool for managing mobile databases, according to officials and sources familiar with their plans.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., will hit at Oracle's claim to offer an "unbreakable" database when, in the next few months, it releases what it calls an Installer that automatically installs SQL Server database security patches. Officials said this will keep the systems up longer.
Hosted CRM software providers UpShot Corp., Salesnet Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are each looking to solve the nagging problem of integrating Microsoft Corp. Outlook contacts, calendar and task lists with sales force automation systems. "If you're firing up a [request for proposal] or setting up a meeting, the last thing you need is to have to put it in two different places," said Lane Baysden, business operations manager at the CDI Professional Services division of CDI Corp. and a user of UpShot's namesake service.
UpShot this week will announce deeper Outlook integration that will allow messages sent or received in Outlook to be attached to the appropriate contact, account and deal in UpShot. The Mountain View, Calif., company expects to deliver this deeper integration by month's end.
Microsoft took early steps Friday to begin obeying court-approved sanctions in its antitrust case, appointing three of its existing board members to a new committee responsible for making sure the software maker doesn't break the rules. The appointments satisfy one requirement that U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly imposed against Microsoft on behalf of nine states that had rejected a settlement the company negotiated with the Justice Department.
The judge ordered Microsoft to allow computer makers and customers to remove icons for some Microsoft features, share some technical information with rivals, agree to uniform contracts with computer makers and agree not to participate in exclusive deals that could hurt competitors.
Microsoft has decided to skip a Windows server release to coincide with the Longhorn client and instead jump directly to Blackcomb, company officials confirmed Friday. Until recently, Microsoft has been talking up plans to synchronize its Windows server and client releases, starting with the next major version of Windows, code-named Longhorn.
But with Windows delivery dates slipping and customers delaying Windows implementation plans due to the sluggish economy, Microsoft is redrawing its roadmap. According to Microsoft's new plan, Longhorn is now a client Windows release only. It will be the successor to Windows XP.
The glitzy Tablet PC launch this week was as notable for who didn't attend as for who did. On the hardware front, a few big players such as Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Toshiba showed up, but many of the Tablet PC devices were made by companies not normally associated with PCs, such as Viewsonic, or companies no one has ever heard about, like Motion Computing. Where was IBM and Dell, for example? Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell said this week that he didn't expect Tablet PCs to be very successful, but that his company would enter the market if proven wrong. IBM is even more negative, describing the new products as "an experiment" that doesn't fit in the company's strategic goals. I think IBM is wrong, and I think Dell is playing it say, like it's done in many product categories (it's first Pocket PC will ship almost three years after the first generation devices, largely because of Dell's wait-and-see attitude). Markets in the Far East alone spell success for the Tablet PC, and if HP's innovative design is any indication, we could be looking at the future of the PC itself. Tablet PCs aren't an experiment or a curiosity.