Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will offer a glimpse Friday of future versions of the company's Visual Studio.Net development tools bundle. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker said this summer that it plans to revamp its tools to work with new products expected to ship in the coming months. Those products include Windows.Net Server, the next version of Microsoft's server operating system, and an upcoming release of the company's SQL Server database code-named Yukon.
At the Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference on Friday, Gates is expected to disclose further details of an update to Visual C++, planned for release early next year as part of a Visual Studio.Net update code-named Everett.
Microsoft officials including Chairman Bill Gates, will reveal details of improvements planned for the Visual C++ .Net and Visual C# .Net programming languages at a conference in Seattle on Friday. At the OOPLSA (Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications) conference Gates and Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer and architect of Microsoft .Net and C#, will discuss the plans for the two programming technologies, which are supported in the Visual Studio .Net development environment.
For Visual C++ .Net, Microsoft plans to have the language conform to the C++ ISO standard with the planned Everett release of the Visual Studio .Net in 2003. The C++ product will be 98 percent compliant with ISO, according to Microsoft.
Judge will get extra power to police accord. The Justice Department is prepared to agree today to minor changes imposed by a judge to the settlement in the landmark Microsoft antitrust case. Lawyers for the company, nine states and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division said they would not object to the changes, which explicitly give U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly additional authority to ensure that Microsoft abides by the agreement over the next five years.
It will be up to state prosecutors to enforce antitrust sanctions against Microsoft Corp. that go beyond the company's settlement with the Justice Department, the department's chief antitrust enforcer said on Thursday. The department's antitrust division won't be responsible for overseeing a handful of additional restrictions that a federal judge added to her landmark antitrust ruling at the behest of some state attorneys general, U.S. antitrust chief Charles James said after a speech on Thursday. The ruling handed down last week by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly endorsed Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the U.S. government and nine states.
Adobe's PDF document-distribution format may seem entrenched among computing consumers, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from trying to throw its weight behind a competing publishing venture. At its Tablet PC launch here on Thursday, Microsoft provided its first public glimpse of its e-publishing technology, code-named ePeriodicals. At a mini-trade show at the launch, Microsoft demonstrated how ePeriodicals could be used to capture, display and deliver to subscribers XML-based digital versions of magazines such as Forbes and The New Yorker. The Financial Times and Slate are also working with Microsoft on ePeriodicals, Microsoft officials said.
Microsoft's long-awaited Tablet PC launch event was a celebration for the company and its enigmatic Chairman, Bill Gates, who had taken this project under his wing. The event featured the usual Microsoft kitsch, with rolling demo tables, plenty of videos, and an interesting collection of celebrities. It was the biggest product rollout the company has staged since its gala Windows XP Launch last year.
Gates walked launch attendees through a history of the devices that led to the Pocket PC, beginning with the Memex, a theoretical computing device invented in 1945 that was designed to look up information, record thoughts, and share them with other people. "It looks like a Tablet PC," Gates joked of the mechanical monstrosity. Gates had a hand in the next major innovation in this space, the Tandy Model 100, a portable favored by journalists in the early 1980's that featured 4 lines of 20 text characters and 32 KB of RAM. "The Tandy's ROM was written by me and one other person," Gates noted. "It was the last Microsoft product on which I did most of the work." Gates actually mentioned the ill-fated Go Corporation, a company from the early 1990's that pioneered a pen-based system that was destroyed when Microsoft decided to drop support and develop its own, suspiciously similar pen-based system. The Microsoft product--Pen for Windows--sold poorly, Gates says, because the hardware and software of the day wasn't up to the challenge.
Microsoft on Thursday said it hired cable television veteran Maggie Wilderotter to help the world's largest software company move more aggressively into interactive television. Wilderotter will join Microsoft on Nov. 26 as senior vice president of business strategy. Previously, she was president and chief executive of Wink Communications Inc., which sells software that allowed viewers to push a button on a remote control and get more information about an advertiser during a television program. Wink Communications is a unit of OpenTV, which is controlled by Liberty Media. In the past six year, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars to take stakes in cable companies, such as Comcast. Wilderotter will report to Craig Mundie, chief technical officer for Advanced Strategies and Policy.
Product lifecycle management software maker Electronic Data Systems Corp. announced on Thursday the deployment of its Teamcenter software on Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. Microsoft on Thursday launched the Tablet PC platform, which features pen input, handwriting recognition, voice command and text-to-speech capabilities.
Teamcenter, which acts essentially as a product knowledge repository, includes applications for collaboration, visualization, data management, process workflow and project management. EDS, of Plano, Texas, is working closely with Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., and Tinker Air Force Base, in Oklahoma City, to develop software called Integrated Point-of-Maintenance eXecution, or I-POMX.
Hoping to write a new chapter in the saga of pen-based computing, Microsoft on Thursday officially unveiled Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.
Executives representing more than 20 companies manufacturing devices using the software joined Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates here for the launch. Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba are among the companies making the new tablet PCs, which are similar to notebook PCs. Most of the devices allow the input of data with a stylus in addition to or instead of a keyboard.
Microsoft and other software developers, including Autodesk, Corel and Groove, have either updated existing programs or released new applications to support the Tablet PC operating system. Microsoft, for example, released an update to Office XP that supports the Tablet PC software's handwriting and "inking" technologies. More sophisticated enhancements will come with Office 11 sometime next year.
Panasonic, is studying the possibility of launching a Tablet PC, Microsoft's Japan unit said Thursday. The company is the ninth partner that Microsoft has said it is working with on the devices, the first models of which are being launched in the Japanese market by Fujitsu, Sotec Co., Toshiba, and Acer this week. The addition of Matsushita to the list of hardware makers supporting the new operating system was announced by Shinichi Ata, president of Microsoft's Japan unit, at a Tokyo news conference held to mark the launch of these new machines and other models from Hewlett Packard and NEC.