Trying to accelerate desktop buying decisions, Microsoft at Gartner's ITxpo on Wednesday released the results of a multi-company study showing that larger IT shops can collectively save billions of dollars over the next few years by moving from Windows and Office 9.X level products to Windows and Office XP.
In one example cited in the study, Windows XP Professional provided users with an average return on investment of more than 200 percent and an annual savings of $187 per desktop per year and as much as $387 for mobile users over a three-year period.
In another example Pella is in the middle of upgrading its 2,200 desktop and laptop systems from a Windows 9X environment to Windows XP Professional and Office Professional. Now with about 75 percent of the rollout done, company officials said they anticipate an overall savings of $250,000 in IT support and administration.
Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday a new "privacy health index" it is using to measure employees' familiarity with privacy policies as part of its "Trustworthy Computing" initiative. Richard Purcell, Microsoft's chief privacy officer, discussed the new tool with executives from Bank of America, General Electric, and about 20 other companies who visited the Redmond campus for a quarterly meeting. The privacy health index assesses how well business units understand and handle privacy concerns and will be part of a broader "Trust Index" that Microsoft is creating to measure the company's performance in security, privacy, reliability and business integrity. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the Trustworthy Computing initiative in January, which emphasized security and privacy in Microsoft products.
Microsoft's Real Time Communications deliverables are in the future, but the not-too-distant future, the company said Wednesday. Greenwich, the collection of realtime technologies to be integrated with Windows.Net Server 2003 will be out in the second or third quarter of 2003, said Dennis Karlinsky, Microsoft product manager of realtime communications. The company hopes to ship Greenwich to key ISVs for testing in December with the beta version due in the first quarter of next year, Karlinsky told attendees of a session at the MEC 2002 show here.
In keeping with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's ongoing quest for improving customer satisfaction, Microsoft is dabbling with two new support and pricing programs. Microsoft's goal is to "provide customers with more effective, readily available support and service," said Ballmer in an open letter to customers, partners and press, published on the Web last week. One of these pilots is called "Microsoft's Support Subscription for Technical Professionals," or SSTP, for short. Microsoft kicked off this trial in July, and it will run through January, 2003. The other pilot is for $99 online assisted support. Microsoft launched this one in September, and it will run through November. After the two pilots end, Microsoft will compile feedback and determine if it should morph the pilots into full-fledged programs, according to company officials.
Dell this fall will enter the handheld computer market with two devices based on Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system, according to company documents that appeared on various enthusiast Web sites this week. According to the documents, one device will sport a 400MHz Intel Corp. Xscale processor, while the other will include a 300MHz chip.
The Dell devices will feature a "Color Transflective" LCD screen, a jog dial and four applications buttons, a microphone and speaker, up to 64MB of SDRAM, a Compact Flash expansion slot that will enable support for Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless technologies, and a Secure Digital expansion slot.
Microsoft won't cut the price on its Windows operating system to compete with a $199 personal computer that runs rival operating software, the No. 1 software company's CEO said on Wednesday. "Somebody is subsidizing that hardware. Somebody's losing -- people know what power supplies and processors cost," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said at a Gartner technology conference here.
The $199 price tag is less than half the price of Windows-based PCs from low-priced vendors like Dell or Gateway, which sell PCs for as little as $500 or $600. It's also below the $399 entry-level price at eMachines Inc. Demand for personal computers has been weak for almost two years as both businesses and consumers have held back on spending. Gartner said earlier this week that a return to higher PC demand may be delayed as users make do with the PCs they already have.
Microsoft's Windows operating systems for low-end PCs costs about $50, and Ballmer said that price has been steady for at least seven years. Cutting the price of the operating system by $20, for instance, wouldn't sell more machines, he said.
Microsoft has bowed to consumer pressure and pulled back from a controversial plan that would have encrypted TV shows recorded on forthcoming digital media PCs. Hewlett-Packard is the exclusive U.S. distributor for the new PCs, which run Windows XP Media Center Edition, a variation on Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system. One of the most compelling features would allow consumers to record TV shows to the computer's hard drive. Known as a digital video recorder (DVR), the feature also would allow consumers to stop live-action TV for instant replays or to schedule recording of shows ahead of time.
But Microsoft chose to copy-protect recorded programming, meaning that it would be viewable only on the one computer. Microsoft claimed that the importance of placating Hollywood about pirated content justified the restriction, even though "fair use" laws give consumers greater freedom in copying shows onto VHS tapes for personal use. The decision also put HP at a competitive disadvantage to Sony, which sells Vaio consumer PCs that can record shows that can be copied to CDs and DVDs or distributed across a home network.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday defended the software maker's controversial licensing plans and its ever-changing consumer strategy.
Ballmer, speaking here at a conference sponsored by market researcher Gartner, acknowledged that Microsoft's recent decision to implement a new software licensing plan has angered some customers. "Sometimes when you clean things up and simplify things, you wind up costing some customers more, and that's problematic," he said.
Despite early resistance, Ballmer said, Microsoft has "seen a very high percentage of customers sign up" for the plan. Ballmer defended the effort, saying that it smoothes out some of the rough spots of earlier licensing schemes. "We recognize the need to assure (customers) that we are delivering continuous value as opposed to lumpy upgrades. We understand that for some customers it represents a less good value than it did a year ago," he said.
You would have thought that the Redmondians would have learned their lesson after Hailstorm (aka My Services) crashed and burned. As you may recall, that initiative was supposed to facilitate e-commerce and Web applications. But we haven't heard much about Hailstorm ever since people found out it would require them to hand over all their personal information (such as passwords and credit card numbers) to Microsoft for (supposedly) safe storage.
But Microsoft did not, apparently, learn from that little fiasco. When the company decided to add a personal video recorder to its new Media Center PC design, it designed the PVR so that content could only be viewed on the PC that recorded it. Which meant, for example, that you couldn't record a TV show, copy it onto a DVD, and view the disk on a consumer DVD player or another PC.
Microsoft Corp. Tuesday announced new storage management middleware and numerous storage hardware partners for its upcoming Windows .Net Server 2003 release. The new software, Volume Shadow Copy Service and Virtual Disk Service, came to light earlier this year and were publicly discussed at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in April. "The VSS is about data; the VDS is about disks," Jay Paulus, a lead product manager in the Redmond, Wash., company's Windows .Net Server group, said at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif.
In essence, VSS is a driver that application developers can write to for conducting storage hardware snapshots, Paulus said. However, it won't be used for actual inter-array virtualization. VDS is similar middleware for Windows for translating between applications and actual disk commands, he said.