WinInsider

In an sometimes bizarre open letter posted to the Microsoft Web site this morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discusses how his company needs to do more to better serve its customers. The bizarre part comes early in the letter, with Ballmer discussing his only other job outside of Microsoft, where he marketed brownie mix and blueberry muffin mix for Proctor & Gamble (which goes unnamed in the letter for some reason) early in his career. Software, Ballmer says, is just like "cake mix, soft drinks, shampoo, and so on," products that need to be marketed in ways that satisfy customers. And if they're done right, he concludes, the same products will go on satisfying consumers for decades.

Microsoft appears to have shut down one of the world's largest distributors of "mod chips"--gray-market add-ons that allow Microsoft's Xbox and other video game consoles to play pirated games. A representative in Microsoft's Australian subsidiary confirmed that the company has taken legal action against Hong Kong-based Lik Sang. Lik Sang's Web site has been offline for nearly two weeks, with a notice on the site blaming a server outage.

Lik Sang was one of the top worldwide retailers of mod chips, devices that, once soldered to a game console's main circuit board, disable security components. The chips typically allow a game machine to play legally and illegally copied discs, run unauthorized software and play game discs intended for other geographic regions.

Microsoft next week plans to disclose more details of a forthcoming update to its Exchange Server communications software, including new features for the Outlook e-mail program. Paul Flessner, a Microsoft senior vice president, will provide a detailed product road map for all of the company's server software when he speaks Tuesday at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif. His talk will focus on how Microsoft's next version of Windows--called Windows.Net Server 2003--is designed to help save businesses money when combined with the company's other software, a Microsoft representative said. Flessner will also discuss new features in Exchange and Outlook designed to increase worker productivity and reduce technology costs for businesses, the representative said.

Microsoft will soon commit to a new policy to give customers "greater clarity and confidence about its support for products through their lifecycles," CEO Steve Ballmer told customers in a broad memo e-mailed out on Wednesday afternoon. But Ballmer would not elaborate on the initiative, and a Microsoft spokesman also declined further comment.

The upcoming new policy initiative was mentioned in what is an ongoing series of e-mails to customers from Microsoft executives, including chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, Ballmer and, from time to time, others. The memos are designed to address those issues that these executives feel are important to consumers, business, the industry and Microsoft itself. In this latest e-mail, Ballmer focuses on what Microsoft is doing to maintain and deepen customer connections with the Redmond, Wash., software firm.

Microsoft this week released the beta code for Systems Management Server 2003, a follow-up product to the aging Systems Management Server 2.0. Little has changed in terms of features since this spring when Microsoft formally unveiled the SMS 2003 name for the product formerly known by the code-name "Topaz".

Systems Management Server consists of tools for software distribution, asset management and remote troubleshooting of Windows-based systems. The main focus area of the SMS 2003 upgrade remains mobile support for laptop users and, later for non-PC Windows devices. SMS 2003 is expected to ship in the first half of 2003, says David Hamilton, director of Microsoft's management business group. Support for the non-PC Windows devices will follow after about a quarter with a the functionality provided in a free download.

As a part-time professional baseball owner--he owns a minority stake in the Seattle Mariners--and a full-time software geek, Microsoft's Jeff Raikes is quite used to wearing more than one hat. Considering what's on his plate these days, that experience will come in handy. The 21-year Microsoft veteran is part of a coterie of top executives entrusted by Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer to get things done. The architect behind Microsoft's successful Office suite strategy in the late 1980s and 1990s, Raikes was put back in charge of Office as group vice president a couple of years ago and set the task of finding a way to kick-start the business. In addition, Raikes has another full-time job at Microsoft in charge of driving the software maker's business tools division, business solutions group and Tablet PC product.

Late yesterday, Advanced Micro Designs (AMD) announced new Athlon microprocessors that close the gap with Intel's most powerful performers. The Athlon XP 2800+ and 2700+ use a 333 MHz bus, a first for AMD, and are roughly comparable to Intel's market-leading Pentium 4, which runs at speeds up to 2.8 GHz. AMD says the speedy new Athlons will become available to customers beginning next month. Of course, by that time, Intel will have likely released its 3 GHz Pentium 4 design, keeping a promise it made earlier this year to hit 3 GHz by the end of 2002.

A federal judge in Baltimore heard arguments Tuesday on whether more than 100 antitrust suits filed by consumers against Microsoft should be grouped together as a class action suit.

In a motion hearing before Judge Frederick Motz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, lawyers Stanley Chesley and Michael Hausfeld argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in favor of class certification of the suits. The consumers' key argument is that Microsoft overcharged for its Windows operating system and violated competition laws in an effort to protect the monopoly status Windows enjoys in the consumer market.

Netscape Communications customers suing the company for privacy invasion are not bound by an end-user license agreement forcing them into arbitration, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday. At least three groups of Netscape users have sued the company in recent years, alleging that the AOL Time Warner unit's SmartDownload software invaded people's privacy and violated laws prohibiting electronic surveillance by sending their personal information back to the company. AOL shuttered the tracking feature soon after it was sued.

But AOL also argued that plaintiffs could not pursue their complaints in the courts because they were obligated to comply with an electronic agreement to resolve disputes via arbitration instead. However, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against AOL on the end-user license issue, saying people who obtained SmartDownload had not received reasonable notice of the terms of the agreement, which in most cases were presented to them on the Web page below the download button. The ruling should clear the way for the privacy suits to go forward. In affirming a lower court decision, the judges also said that the agreement, which was designed to cover Communicator, did not also apply to the SmartDownload plug-in.

Web services represents the key to meeting the challenge of business agility, a Microsoft Corp. executive said in his keynote address Tuesday morning at the Fall Internet World 2002 show here. Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, said that in today's environment, businesses must be agile and that "success in the business world is really about reacting to change."

In what one attendee afterward called "a great big Microsoft commercial," Fitzgerald outlined five strategies for achieving business agility, but added that the strategies all link back to one primary challenge: integration. "You have to embrace change and try to react to it," Fitzgerald said. "We have to rethink IT priorities, particularly in the current environment of belt tightening, and be able to evolve as requirements change over time."