Last year, Microsoft merged its two Windows lines--9x/Me and NT/2000--into one, Windows XP. Now the company is launching three new XP-based products. To learn why, PC World editors Harry McCracken and Yardena Arar interviewed Microsoft's top Windows guy--Jim Allchin, vice president for Microsoft's Platforms Group. Here's a partial transcript of the conversation.
Q. Is there some big strategy here?
A. Yes, absolutely. After 11 years we finally got to the NT code base for basically everyone. And the benefits of that [include] higher reliability, more stability, security, and the like for consumers. It's obviously better for IHVs [independent hardware vendors] because they only have to write one driver and it will work everywhere. And now we have the flexibility to target specific customer needs very quickly without having a splintering of the code base.
After six months of investigation into Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive business practices, Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has agreed to begin the procedure of administrative settlement of the charges. At the request of the software giant, Taiwan will now work with Microsoft to negotiate a settlement with which both sides can agree. Not coincidentally, the attempted settlement comes just days after Microsoft announced plans to set up a $23 million technology center in Taiwan.
Microsoft's Taiwan investigation began in May 2002 when the Taiwan FTC organized a taskforce to probe allegations that the software giant was abusing its market power in the country to harm competitors and fix software prices. Taiwan's investigation is similar to high profile antitrust investigations against the company in Europe and the United States.
Microsoft is coming to a theater near you. The software giant on Wednesday said its Windows Media 9 technology will be used to screen a series of eight movies in some 25 cities around the United States in partnership with Digital Cinema Solutions (DCS), carmaker BMW, and a number of independent movie studios.
The series will kick off next week at New York's Apollo Theater with a screening of Artisan Entertainment's "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a documentary about The Funk Brothers, a little-known studio band now credited with crafting the sound made famous by headlining vocalists at the Motown label. A series of BMW advertisements, also screened in Microsoft's digital format, will run before the movie.
A U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction Wednesday that bars Intel from making and selling its Itanium processor, but immediately suspended that order to allow the chipmaker to appeal the ruling. After the order, an Intel representative said the company would pay Intergraph $100 million for a license to Intergraph's technology if it loses its appeal in the case. Earlier this month, the court ruled that Itanium violated patents held by Intergraph and ordered the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker to pay Intergraph $150 million.
Video-on-demand site Movielink said Wednesday that it will use technology from both RealNetworks and Microsoft to run its imminent service for Internet movie rentals. In two separate announcements, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company said it chose Microsoft Windows Media and RealNetworks technology for its service, which is expected to launch by the end of the year. The deals cover video-streaming encoding, decoding and media player technology, as well as digital rights management technology to protect Movielink's library of films from Net piracy.
Movielink, which is backed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros., has been two years in the making, during which time many other Internet film distributors have come and gone. As the service gets ready to debut, it has signed several technology deals to prepare the venture, including those with RealNetworks and Microsoft. In September, it inked a three-year deal with IBM for film storage and security.
Microsoft unveiled Wednesday the first technical preview of its .Net Speech Platform and also announced availability of the second beta release of its .Net Speech Software Developer Kit (SDK) at the Speech TEK conference in New York. As unveiled, the speech platform contains the Microsoft speech recognition engine, the middleware to connect into a telephony system, the SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) interpreter, a SALT voice browser, and the SpeechWorks text-to-speech engine.
The .Net Speech Platform will give developers and customers a foundation to design a single application that can run a speech-enabled application in a variety of venues, including telephony, desktops, and in a multimodal format on mobile devices. The platform is expected to enter beta testing next summer and ship by the end of 2003.
Windows 2000 received the Common Criteria security certification on Tuesday after Microsoft invested millions of dollars and three years of effort to gain the certification. Windows 2000 is the first Microsoft product to achieve the three-year-old Common Criteria security certification. The Common Criteria is a joint security standard accepted by 15 countries, and it supplants such previous national and regional security stamps as the U.S. Trusted Computer Systems Evaluation Criteria C2 and the European Information Technology Security Evaluation Criteria E3/F-C2 evaluations. Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 4.0 earned those certifications.
Thanks to Topper for sending this one! The latest
benchmark comparing J2EE vs. .NET has been released. To no surprise".NET
blows J2EE out of the water" The benchmark is available at
here, also there is open forum discussing going on here. This is pretty important stuff, so far lame-media have been shouting about J2EE,
but their "J2EE performance" fantasy may be coming to an end. Here are some of the comments made...
"It is important for the J2EE community to realize we are facing serious
competition here."
"It is not surprising that .NET will outperform J2EE, since in many
regards what is being compared is the performance of C# vs. Java. I would assume
C# would be inherently faster than Java on Windows/Intel."
"This benchmark is going to have a cosmic impact. I think the most
sensible thing to do for Sun and al. is to kill (in one way or another) the EJB
technology. EBJs are cripling J2EE in term of complexity and performance, thus
completly failing to reach their initial goals."
UPDATED Well, Ditto has done it again! This time provider some fantastic screenshots of the Office 11 web-portal. Screenshot: one two three.
I have received word from Office 11 beta insider, Ditto, that as a part of the Office11 beta program testers have access to personalized web portal powered by SharePoint Team service, which allows you to share Documents, Images and discussions in real time. The pages can be themed and users with varying access levels can be added to the group. "All in all it's pretty nice". The notifying email reads...
Dear **************,
STSBETA\stsadminacct has invited you to join the [http://*****.net] team web site. Your user name and password for accessing this site are:
User name: ***************
Password: **********
Microsoft has told beta testers of Office 11, its next-version Office desktop productivity suite, that the product will only work with the Windows 2000 operating system with Service Pack 3 installed, Windows XP and later desktop releases. This means that the more than 50 percent of the Redmond, Wash., software company's installed customer base, who still run Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium, will not be able to upgrade to Office 11 when it is released next year without first upgrading to at least Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 installed.
In a posting to the Office beta newsgroups, Sloan Crayton, of Microsoft Office Beta Support, said there are a number of reasons for removing support for Windows 9x. "As a number of you have noted, Windows 98 and 98 SE are getting a bit old now. It also relates heavily to the push to improve security in our products.
