T-Online International, phone giant Deutsche Telekom's Internet service provider, said Thursday it is in talks to offer a service based on Microsoft's Xbox games console. "We're in talks with Microsoft regarding Xbox," T-Online spokeswoman Dagmar Nielsen told Dow Jones Newswires. Microsoft's Xbox Live, which will allow Internet users with a broadband connection to play games online as well as talk with competitors and download new levels and characters, is to go on sale in eight European countries, including Germany, starting March 14. Microsoft said earlier this week it would work on the project with broadband providers such as BT Group's Openworld and France Telecom unit Wanadoo.
The initial reaction to Windows XP Service Pack 1 is that it's big and it doesn't seem to do anything. No argument on the size issue--it's immense and it needs gobs of free disk space to install itself. That it doesn't have much visible impact on the system is a good thing. There was a time when Microsoft took a lot of heat for introducing new features into service packs, which are typically supposed to be conglomerations of bug fixes. There are a few new features in SP1, but only a few, and you'd generally have to go looking for them or you wouldn't know they were there.
After installing SP1 I visited the Windows Update site and was surprised to see that several previously listed entries had been uninstalled from my system. Some are reasonable, such as the upgrade to Windows Movie Maker--I don't want it. But some, like the .Net Framework Service Pack 2, seem like they should be in the main service pack.
So maybe SP1 isn't so boring after all, especially for Anarchy Online users. The most important part is that a large number of bugs are fixed by it and that new systems will ship with those fixes.
Recently, Intel announced Itanium 2, its second-generation 64-bit processor in the Itanium family. Although Itanium 2 is a much stronger hardware platform than the first Itanium, broad near-term market acceptance will now hinge on Microsoft software support.
With highly distributed n-tier (DBMS, application, and Web) server architectures commoditizing during 2002-04, Unix (other than Solaris) will recede to high-end, low-volume, niche-platform status by 2005/06. Windows will increasingly dominate for midtier application servers (2002-04), due to growing ISV reference platform momentum, and be a suitable DBMS server for more than 90 percent of application requirements. Linux on Intel ("Lintel") will be a successful high-volume Web, technical computing, and appliance server OS, but enterprise application package (2003/04) and DBMS (2005/06) server penetration will be slower. Linux software and services prices will increase to about 10-20 percent less than those of Windows by 2004/05.
Microsoft on Thursday opened its Center For Information Work, a laboratory that will let technicians and other researchers explore ways to improve life at the office. The center, located in Redmond, Wash., will match people with technological prototypes that are still five or so years away from becoming products and see what works. For example, the company is currently tinkering with RingCam, a video camera that captures a 360-degree view of a room. Potential applications include a videoconferencing situation where several people seated around a table need to be featured on the screen, a Microsoft representative said.
Another experimental prototype is BroadBench, a giant, semicircular LCD display that features three independent viewing regions. By using all three screens, users can read e-mail, annotate documents and place bets at online gaming sites at the same time. Researchers will try to determine whether productivity and problem solving change in multimonitor environments.
Microsoft's new hard-nosed tactics on software licensing apparently have worked, as an analyst says the tech leader's fiscal first quarter is tracking according to expectations. In a note released early Wednesday afternoon, Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund said he believes Microsoft's first-quarter results are likely to be tracking in line with his estimates, which peg earnings at $1.88 a share in fiscal year 2003.
Sherlund cited strong licensing activity in July, which was the deadline for large business customers to switch to a subscription-based payment system. Large business customers had to upgrade their Microsoft software and change to a subscription-based payment system -- or else face higher licensing fees for software in the future.
Microsoft is looking for a better way to make sense of your chicken scratch. The current version of its Tablet PC operating system, which lets computer users control their machines with a pen-like device instead of just a mouse and keyboard, matches people's scrawls against the company's own database of handwriting samples. The idea is to ensure that the unlimited variety of T's that human hands can produce will, in fact, be recognized as T's.
Even though the software, due to appear in devices Nov. 7, can match against the many different types of handwriting in its database, it can't adapt to an individual user's style of writing and learn, for example, that the person never crosses his or her T's.
Microsoft on Thursday plans to announce hardware discounts and additional services for MSN 8 broadband subscribers who are buying the company's networking products. Last week, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant unveiled new wired and wireless networking gear for connecting to cable and DSL (digital subscriber line) broadband services. Microsoft hopes the hardware, combined with its pending MSN 8 online service, will help it rapidly launch a nationwide broadband network.
As part of its promotion of MSN broadband, Microsoft plans to offer a discount by about 20 percent on its MN-500 Wireless Base Station. The product offers 802.11b wireless networking, or Wi-Fi, which connects computers to the Internet or local network without wires at speeds up to 11mbps at a maximum range of 300 feet. The discount means consumers would pay around $120, instead of $150, for the MN-500.
Microsoft is weighing a plan to add a new milestone to its Windows road map. According to developers close to the Redmond, Wash., company, a proposal to deliver a Windows 'Yukon' release-timed to tide over Microsoft and its users until the long-awaited Longhorn debuts-is on the company's drawing boards.
Microsoft executives have held fast to their promise that Longhorn will be the version of Windows designed to follow Windows XP on the desktop, and Windows .Net Server 2003 on the server. In recent weeks, however, company representatives have taken to calling Longhorn the next "major" version of Windows.
MSN 8 to Arrive in Late October
WinInfo
Microsoft will unveil the latest update to its MSN online service in late October. MSN 8 is an impressive new release, though it is somewhat tempered by its Hotmail-like approach to supplying functionality to users. In the past, the distinction between MSN customers and other online users accessing MSN services was pretty small: People that paid MSN for access were able to dial directly into MSN from anywhere in the US and had access to MSN email accounts, but that was about it. However, with MSN 8, Microsoft is shutting off many services to non-MSN customers for the first time, making the service potentially more valuable to paying customers. And with growth of AOL Time Warner's America Online service stalling under the weight of its perpetually out-of-date user interface, which annoys users with numerous pop-up windows and advertisements, MSN might finally be poised to make some serious gains on the market leader.
Microsoft Thursday will open, on its Redmond campus, the Center for Information Work (CIW), which houses prototypes of potential productivity technologies of the future. Microsoft, working with center partners Sony Electronics Inc., Intel Corp. and Acer Inc., is running numerous prototypes of software and systems that could hit the market within five years. Prototype technologies from Microsoft Research currently at the Center include BroadBench, a display with a screen 44-inches wide by 11-inches high.
This display would probably cost around $10,000 today, but the price would be a lot lower if hundreds of thousands of them were built, said Gary Starkweather, an architect for Microsoft Research and the developer of BroadBench. "There has been enormous enthusiasm for the product from people like operations managers who want to put a whole lot of servers or functional modules on the screen so they can have an operator watch what's going on with their network," he said.