Best Buy's relationship with Microsoft may be in jeopardy. The two companies have an advertising and profit-sharing agreement that expires in March, Best Buy said in its quarterly report filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Microsoft has told Best Buy that it intends to let the deal expire, Best Buy said.
"We are in negotiations with Microsoft to extend our alliance. If we are unable to extend our alliance with Microsoft or to replace it with a comparable (deal), future operating results could be affected," Best Buy said in its filing.
The two companies announced an alliance in December 1999. As part the agreement, which was signed in April 2000, Microsoft bought $200 million of Best Buy stock and agreed to promote the company's BestBuy.com online store on its MSN properties. In return, Best Buy agreed to promote Microsoft products, specifically MSN, in its stores and through print and broadcast ads.
Microsoft is investigating a security breach on a server that hosts its Windowsbeta community, which allows more than 20,000 Windows users a chance to test software that is still in development. As a result of the break-in, Microsoft advised its beta testers to change their passwords late last week. However, company spokesman Rick Miller downplayed the significance of the incident, saying the online trespasser didn't get access to the company's crown jewels: its source code. However, the system does contain yet-unreleased versions of Microsoft's Windows products. In addition, the hacker would have had access to the comments posted by the beta testers, as well as the key used by the beta testers to activate their software, said Miller.
Only a year ago, Microsoft and the rest of the high-tech industry were anticipating huge consumer demand for Web services ranging from shopping to communication. Then reality set in. Originally code-named HailStorm, Microsoft's plan for delivering consumer Web services immediately ran into resistance because of security concerns and confusion. Microsoft made matters worse by publicly christening the program as .Net My Services, a name often mistaken for its broader .Net technology architecture.
Now, the company is building its consumer Web services around its MSN Internet access service--a move that poses yet another set of risks, given that the online property has been a money-losing operation for years. The decision will fall under intense scrutiny this month when Microsoft breaks out MSN revenue from other consumer products for the first time in the company's quarterly financial report.
Microsoft's fiscal first-quarter net income and sales probably will rise more than forecast because customers bought more of the company's products in July, analysts said. The company, which reports results tomorrow for the period ended Sept. 30, will "meet or slightly exceed" Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund's estimate for earnings of 42 cents a share on sales of $7.07 billion, he wrote in a report. The average Thomson First Call estimates are for profit of 43 cents and sales of $7.14 billion. Microsoft saw a "strong surge in contract signings" from customers agreeing to a new software-licensing program in time for the plan's deadline, said Heather Bellini, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney.
Microsoft will launch two new editions of Windows XP in the coming weeks, capping off a year of improvements to the best selling Windows version ever. Windows XP Media Center Edition, designed for home-based Media Center PCs, will launch on October 29, with two PCs makers--Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Samsung--signed on, and more to follow in 2003. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition--aimed at a new class of notebook computers--will launch November 7, with a wealth of third party support. Both launches are taking place in New York City, and both products will only be made available with the special types of PCs they target.
I found this on Bink's WindowsXP.nu. It seems as IE7 will be last IE version from MS ;(
Here are some rumors on features that may be included in IE 7
- There will be a spell checker for forms and for people who have office 11 there will be a thesauruse both will work the same way is the right click menu that already exists in MS word(red underline etc)
- Popups. There will be no popup stopper but there will be limits on what popups can do (no full screen and multiple popups etc)
- Tabs there is likely to be some sort of tab UI but it is likely to be different to the in Mozilla and Opera.
There will be no version for Windows NT4
IE 7 will be IE .NET and it will be the last IE !! Microsoft accepted that integrating IE into the shell was a bad idea from a security perspective (not marketing wise ;)) so they are diversifying IE from the shell and making a new browser. MSN explorer is planned to take over when the IE line ends.....
Microsoft on Tuesday published for the first time how long customers are guaranteed product support. Analysts generally praised the announcement, which they also said was too long coming.
"People were starting to get worried, because the likely release dates that were starting to come out for some new products made it look like there might be some problems of people having to upgrade almost immediately to get some support," said Paul DeGroot of Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm that follows the software giant. The overhauled support policy "does provide a fair amount of predictability."
The new policy means Microsoft customers now have clear guidelines by which they can evaluate how long the software giant will support its products. As part of the new support policy, Microsoft greatly extended how long it would support some products due for retirement.
If you're Brad Chase, life after Microsoft is kid's stuff. The former Microsoft executive who helped chart the company's late and aggressive Internet strategy has launched Entspire, a new company that focuses on family entertainment products. Entspire's first two projects are a children's game and a book series. While the books will be composed of stories submitted through a Web site, both products are primarily offline properties.
Intel is hitting the gas on Banias. The chip, a completely new mobile processor coming from Intel in the first quarter of next year, will include a 1MB secondary cache, said Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel's Design Center, where the chip was developed. That's twice as big as the cache found on the Pentium 4 and the same size found on the company's Xeon chip for servers. The cache is a reservoir of memory integrated into the processor for rapid data access.
The size of the cache bolsters Intel's claims that the chip will be one of the top performing mobile chips in the world when it debuts. More cache typically leads to higher performance. The chip will be introduced at speeds of 1.6GHz, 1,5GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.3GHz, slower than the Pentium 4. The larger cache, though, will likely narrow the performance gap created by the differences in speed.
Ever wonder what the alpha user of Microsoft software, Microsoft's internal IT Group, is doing about security? Microsoft corporate vice president and chief information officer Rick Devenuti offered a glimpse last week during MEC 2002 in Anaheim, Calif. He also touched on some security efforts underway in Microsoft's IT department. For one thing, the company is rolling out smart cards for two-factor authentication. Currently, 27,000 employees are using cards for remote access to the network. By year end, all employees will use them, Devenuti says.
Another major way network security is being increased in Redmond is through the institution of what Devenuti calls a secure remote user/remote quarantine service. When users attempt to access the Microsoft network remotely, their systems are checked to ensure that a firewall is installed and that their anti-virus software has been updated recently, among other things. If the system does not pass, it is placed in a quarantine area where the user can download the necessary bits to get the system into compliance.