Almost a year after its debut in the United States, Microsoft has revealed plans to launch the Xbox game console in Singapore before the winter holidays. Customized for Asian hands with a smaller controller, the Xbox is expected to debut with a selection of English and Chinese game titles. While the total number of games are undisclosed, Xbox project manager Alex Chua said titles to be released include "Halo," "Project Gotham Racing," "Blink" and "Mech Assault."
With its built-in 100mbps Ethernet port and 8GB hard drive, the company is banking on the console's Internet-ready online gaming capability as a key differentiator from other game consoles. Last week, Microsoft said the online game service for the machine is slated for launch in Japan in January. The company is still finalizing similar launch plans for other parts of Asia.
Market researcher International Data Corporation (IDC) issued a report Monday, in which it notes that Microsoft's share of the usually staid server market jumped dramatically. Microsoft, which owned 41 percent of the market in 2000, saw its market share rise to 49 percent in 2001, IDC says.
IDC noted that Microsoft's success came thanks to Windows 2000 Server adoption. "We looked at Microsoft's growth in 2001 and found part of it was Microsoft's licensing programs, but we believe part of it was because already some Microsoft customers had gone into a large Windows 2000 upgrade cycle," IDC analyst Al Gillen says. "It's the combination of those two factors."
Although Microsoft cannot compete against Linux on price, the company will use its community of professionals to outsmart the open-source movement, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told an audience of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) in London on Monday.
"Linux is a serious competitor," said Ballmer. "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way. We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn't going to go away--our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace."
He acknowledged there was more to Linux than free software--the main benefit of the open-source movement was the community developing software and sharing ideas. "Linux is not about free software, it is about community," he said. "It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money--it started off bankrupt, in a way."
Microsoft said on Tuesday it remained confident about its future, which was why it was raising an army of new recruits and investing tens of millions of dollars in a partnership with Hewlett-Packard. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer used a European tour to launch a new initiative with HP, aimed at bringing .NET services from Microsoft to businesses. "It's a major investment and will give major new capacities to the market to people who can move forward with .NET," Ballmer told journalists here. Together they will hire thousands of engineers, and sales and service staff for .NET.
Steve Ballmer tells a London audience that Microsoft developers must match the passion and energy of the Linux community, as well as producing better technology. Although Microsoft cannot compete against Linux on price, the company will use its community of professionals to outsmart the open-source movement, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told an audience of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) in London on Monday.
"Linux is a serious competitor," said Ballmer. "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way. We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn't going to go away -- our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace."
Microsoft has changed the internal configuration of its Xbox game console, a move intended to thwart hackers and lower manufacturing costs. Word of the changes began spreading on sites devoted Xbox hacking, with some buyers of recently manufactured Xbox units complaining that mod chips designed for the original console won't work now. Microsoft Xbox spokeswoman Molly O'Donnell confirmed that the company had made minor changes to the console's configuration as part of ongoing efforts to "increase security and reduce overall costs."
The newly configured units were first spotted in Australia, where Xbox hackers spotted slight changes to the main circuit board that likely will make it impossible to use current "mod chips"--add-ons that bypass security measures built into the hardware.
Projects with code-names such as "Sapphire" and "Sideshow" may not conjure up visions of futuristic technology, but they promise to deliver advancements in how computers process and secure information, the head of Microsoft's research division said during a visit to San Francisco last week. Armed with a long history in software development, engineers at Microsoft Research are working to invent new ways to secure PCs and digital content and create new applications that make computers easier to interact with, its senior vice president of research, Rick Rashid, said in an interview.
With a budget that the company estimates will top $5.2 billion during the 2003 fiscal year, Microsoft Research also is taking a look at devising new concepts for the user interface and file systems, which Rashid said probably will revolve around what he called "human context."
"Today it's all designed around what computers can do, not around people," he said. "We're looking at creating contextual user interfaces that really understand what a person is working on in the context of what they're doing."
Microsoft plans to spend more than $3 billion over the next three years on its Office productivity suite and hopes to double annual revenue from Office to $20 billion by 2010. "I have a $20 billion dream for Office, but the product will be so much more than what we think of today. There will be new categories of application value from a client standpoint, as well as around servers and XML services. "We can create enough value for this business to grow 10 percent a year over the next 10 years, giving us some $10 billion annually in revenue growth, alone, at the end of that time," said Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of productivity and business services, in a presentation at Microsoft's campus here on Monday afternoon.
Small-to-medium sized businesses are currently underserved with business applications, relatively compared to the large business market, he said. "This decade will see people demanding that they are able to interact electronically with all businesses, so my goal with the Great Plains and Navision acquisitions is to offer far more than just great accounting software.
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft plan to invest $50 million in a joint effort to sell corporate customers on the software giant's .Net Web services efforts. As previously reported, HP plans to devote 3,000 consultants from its HP Services unit to the effort and also train 5,000 people in its sales and support staff. While acknowledging that .Net is still in its early stages, HP Services chief Ann Livermore said now is the time to start selling companies on the idea of using Web services to automate their businesses.
Livermore said Microsoft's approach to using the Internet to automate business tasks can help businesses react faster and save money. In addition to training its services and sales staffs on .Net, HP will also set up 160 three-person sales teams specifically focused on selling companies on using the Microsoft .Net technology.
Microsoft is inching closer to its expected October launch of its MSN 8 Internet service, as documented by testers who recently obtained the newest beta release and posted some of the screen shots to the Web. Microsoft delivered Beta 2 of MSN 8 on Sept. 17, company officials confirmed. Beta 2 went to a "limited" number of internal Microsoft testers and "key" MSN reviewers, a company spokeswoman said.
Microsoft officials have said the company plans to launch MSN 8 in October, the same month that Time Warner/America Online is slated to launch AOL 8. Some of the Windows enthusiast sites have cited October 24 as the rumored launch date. Publicly, Microsoft is holding fast to its "this fall" MSN 8 launch date. In addition to including more e-mail and IM tracking and filtering, MSN 8 also is expected to include a shared-browsing capability that will go beyond the shared whiteboarding provided via the Windows Messenger component of Windows XP.