Microsoft on Monday announced a marketing partnership with Budweiser to promote its Xbox video game console, part of its push to find new ways to grab sales during the critical holiday season. Under the deal, Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch will help the software giant rotate 300 Xbox demo units through thousands of bars in the United States between now and the end of the year. Patrons will be invited to play Xbox games and to register to win promotional items from both companies.
While some analysts have said Microsoft needs to focus on younger consumers to reach a mass-market audience, the new promotion is another indication the company intends to continue courting older, hardcore gamers.
Microsoft released Monday the first update to business software acquired in its billion-dollar buy of Navision earlier this year. The software giant acquired Navision in July for $1.45 billion as part of its long-planned move into the market for enterprise applications--complex programs designed to help companies do such things as process orders and manage inventory, as well as track customers, suppliers and employees. Microsoft said a new version of Navision's Axapta 3.0, an enterprise resource planning package, includes more features to allow medium-sized companies to conduct business online.
Microsoft is out with a new Bluetooth-enabled keyboard and mouse, designed to cut the cable that currently links most PCs to their peripherals. Wireless mice and keyboards are nothing new. Bluetooth peripherals, however, are new, and their appearance shows that Microsoft is once again willing to invest early in technologies it wants to popularize.
Bluetooth, as you probably know, is a radio technology intended for short-range (less than 30 feet) communication between devices. Today, you can buy Bluetooth-enabled PDAs, printers, and cell phones; I've already tried samples of each. You can also add Bluetooth connectivity to your Windows desktop or notebook computer. Mac OS X also supports Bluetooth, but doesn't yet know how to use it for printing.
The Microsoft .NET platform continues to gain support from enterprise application vendors with Siebel and Best Software pledging support in their forthcoming CRM ( customer relationship management) offerings.
As part of a multiyear global strategic alliance with Microsoft announced last week, Siebel will incorporate Microsoft's .Net software into products and participate with Microsoft in related development and marketing efforts. Best will announce this week that its new Saleslogix Version 6 CRM architecture is .Net compatible and designed to facilitate integration with applications built with Visual Basic and Visual Stdio.NET.
Yusuf Mehdi is not one to shy away from a good fight. As director of marketing for the Windows operating system in the early 1990s, Mehdi helped direct Microsoft's successful strategy against IBM's OS/2. A few years later, he found himself back in the thick of things, this time as marketing manager for Internet Explorer as Microsoft vanquished Netscape Communications in the slugfest over Internet browsers.
In both instances, Microsoft started from behind only to emerge with slam-dunk victories. These days, the 36-year-old Mehdi is hoping three's a charm as he heads up the company's MSN unit. But in taking on America Online, Microsoft faces a formidable foe with more than twice its share in the online services market.
Micro Focus on Monday will announce an alignment with Microsoft to more closely bring enterprise Cobol into Microsoft's .Net Framework, according to Micro Focus. The company next year will bundle Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net development tool with the Micro Focus Net Express development environment for migrating Cobol applications.
Next Express 4.5 will feature Visual Studio .Net, but it will only be available to selected early adopters beginning in December and will not be available in a general release until June 2003. However, users can still buy the products separately and use them together today.
Many thanks to Ditto for letting me know that Microsoft will be
shipping the following office applications and resources with the Office 11 beta
CDs.
Welcome to the beta release of Office 11 and Office Family products. You can
expect your beta kit to be delivered within the next few days.
Your kit will contain the following components:
- These CDs - Office 11, FrontPage 11 and Publisher 11
- Setup Instructions
- Newsgroup Instructions
- Layperson specifications outlining what's new in each product area
For this beta program, BetaPlace and Newsgroup services will be available to
you. BetaPlace is Microsoft's technical beta web community where you can:
- Update your contact information
- Receive up to date program information and downloads if applicable
- Obtain general beta testing guidelines and information
To access BetaPlace, go to
http://www.betaplace.com. Sign in using your Beta ID and Password listed
below. More detailed information on BetaPlace will be included in your beta kit.
XML documents, encapsulated in SOAP messages, are the packets of the business Web. Standards efforts under way focus on how to create, transform, interpret, sign, and encrypt these packets as they flow among communicating applications and services. Because XML documents will often model the real business documents that support business processes, such as purchase orders, it's clear that people will need to be able to write them, too. Sadly, the tools that capture nearly all of our keystrokes -- e-mail, word processors, Web pages -- can't compose valid XML. Solving this problem is as critical as any challenge facing Web services today. Ideally every operating system would offer a standard XML editing component, embeddable in Web pages and GUI applications. Wired to a DTD (Document Type Definition) or XML Schema, this component would allow users to interactively create or modify valid instances of the DTD or schema.
Microsoft's C# programming language and .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) have passed through a working group within the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and will likely be approved as open standards by January. C# and the CLR were already declared standards by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) in late 2001, and with ISO certification in the works, we'll start seeing third party C# compilers and implementations of the .NET environment that run on Linux or other non-Microsoft platforms. It's a crazy, crazy world out there.
With Microsoft about to issue a second release candidate of its upcoming Windows .Net Server 2003, many companies have begun evaluating the new platform in earnest. The new Internet Information Server 6.0 has a redesigned architecture that offers better performance and the ability to deploy more secure and reliable applications. For companies that want to build an n-tier application design, Microsoft will even offer a lightweight "Web server" version of .Net Server designed to be deployed as the presentation-layer machines for a data center.
.Net Server will also be the first Microsoft OS system to ship with the .Net runtime (version 1.1) fully integrated. This integration includes new management tools and integration with other key features of the OS, like Active Directory (AD). The packaging of the .Net runtime and application services (IIS, transaction management, etc.) with the core network OS means that buying .Net Server is now the functional equivalent of purchasing a Unix OS and a third-party application server to manage application objects.