Although he lost almost a fifth of his net worth in the past year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates remained the richest man in the United States, with a fortune of $43 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Gates lost $11 billion last year, but still remained ahead of investor Warren Buffett -- one of the few on the list to see his fortunes increase in a year when an economic recession brought a sharp drop in stock prices. Buffett holds the No. 2 spot, increasing his net worth from $33 billion to $36 billion.
Rounding out the top 10 are Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen with $21 billion at No. 3, the five heirs to the late Sam Walton's Wal-Mart fortune (each with $18.8 billion at No. 4), Oracle's Larry Ellison with $15.2 billion at No. 9 and Microsoft President Steve Ballmer with $11.9 billion at No. 10.
As general manager of Microsoft's platform strategy group, Charles Fitzgerald has a front seat perspective on how the company's tools, server, and client initiatives come together. In the wake of Microsoft's release of the beta version of its Web Services Development Kit, Fitzgerald met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and News Editor Mark Jones to discuss the decomposition of enterprise applications, Microsoft's upcoming CRM play, and the role of Microsoft Office as Web services consumer.
Intel will once again increase the performance of notebooks when it releases a new 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M chip on Monday, according to sources familiar with its plans. The new Pentium 4-M, with "M" as in mobile, will boast an extra 200MHz in clock speed and will cost more, but will otherwise be the same as the current 2GHz Pentium 4-M. A number of brand-name computer makers are expected to add the new chip to their flagship notebook models, which typically start at $2,000.
The new chip may only boost the Pentium 4-M by 200MHz, but for Intel and also for PC makers, it pays to keep notebook technology moving ahead. That's because the market for notebooks has remained relatively strong and because portables sell with a higher price tag than PCs typically do. To keep notebook and chips sales rolling, Intel even moved up the launch for its 2GHz Pentium 4-M to June, which pulled the 2.2GHz chip's introduction forward as well.
A growing number of desktop-savvy Linux releases, including a polished looking Red Hat Linux 8.0 that's due this fall, have analysts wondering if maybe, just maybe, the open source solution has what it takes to steal Windows' thunder. But the analysts all seem to fall back on the lack of a Microsoft Office version for Linux as the main reason why Linux will fail. This is ridiculous: Consider Mac OS X, which has a wonderful Microsoft Office version, Office v. X, featuring 100 percent document compatibility with the Windows versions. If Mac OS X can't steal market share from Windows, how the heck is Linux going to do it? The problems with Linux on the desktop run far deeper than Office, and it's going to take a lot more refinement and improvement before anyone will even seriously consider such a thing. As I noted this week in Connected Home Express, the competition can't just be as good as Windows to succeed: It has to be two or three times as good. Otherwise, the cost and aggravation of switching is just too high.
Enter AOL with its wispy yet effective AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), spoon-fed to legions of indentured novice subscribers. AOL had the logical notion that it could control the category by snapping up the free-spirited scrappers at Mirabilis (the creator of ICQ), eventually consolidating the two largest instant messaging camps into an unbeatable controlling force.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and others unsuccessfully tried to interoperate with AIM. Several products and companies were hurt in the process, including Tribal Voice, Peoplelink, IChat Messenger, and even Yahoo, though its well-designed instant messaging product today enjoys a loyal user base. AOL has since kept the ICQ world separate from AIM. I still can't figure out why they do this. Perhaps it's out of fear that ICQ's Birkenstock-shod crowd would bolt at the mere whiff of commercialization.
IBM's Bob Sutor wants to see Java turned into a real standard, but Sun fears a loss of control could threaten Java's promise of write-once, run-anywhere.
Sun, which owns the patents to Java, still retains veto power. Also, Sun's intellectual property stake in the technology allows the company to connect other requirements to Java and to those who want to profit from it. First and foremost of those are licensing fees that Sun collects from vendors who attach the Java brand to their products (i.e.: IBM's WebSphere or BEA's WebLogic). The actual fees that Sun charges to those vendors are one of the IT industry's best-kept secrets. Sun refuses to disclose what it charges Java licensees, and the licensees never tell.
But evidence suggests that not everyone pays the same price. Sources familiar with the licensing schedule say the players involved with the mobile JSRs pay more than vendors in the other JSRs, perhaps due to the prevalence of devices like cell phones. Oracle is rumored to have cut a sweetheart deal in exchange for pulling out of an IBM-led organization (openserver.org) that Sun perceived to be a threat to the Java brand. (Oracle's withdrawal from that effort precipitated that group's collapse.)
A week after Microsoft debuted a preliminary version of its new media player system, the company signed a deal with Moviesystem, one of Europe's largest video-on-demand providers, to use Windows Media Audio and Video 9 Series in its upcoming Internet service NetCine, which will launch Sept. 18 with an online library of 500 films. Last week, the company featured deals with U.S.-based on-demand movie ventures Intertainer and CinemaNow, which are showcasing Windows' latest audio and video encoding and player technology.
In addition, the company announced several deals with top chipmakers, including National Semiconductor, Sigma Designs and Texas Instruments. Under the deals, the chipmakers will include support for Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series in various set-top boxes and electronic devices for the home. Microsoft also said at a conference in the Netherlands that it signed on several digital broadcasting partners in Europe, including Tandberg Television and NTL Broadcast.
Nvidia the sole supplier of graphics chips for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox video-game console, must keep selling processors to the software maker as the companies try to settle a pricing dispute, an arbitrator ruled. In an interim ruling, the panel said Nvidia must supply Microsoft's "reasonable requirements of chipsets," without specifying the exact quantities, according to an Nvidia filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The ruling was made July 18, Nvidia spokesman Derek Perez said.
Microsoft claims it should have paid at least $46 million less than it has for chips used to generate graphics in the Xbox, the filing said. In April, Microsoft asked an arbitration panel to order Nvidia to cut prices and supply as many chips as necessary. Perez said the company had no intention of stopping sales of chips to Microsoft.
Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at Microsoft laid out the roadmap during a keynote address at the Windows Server DevCon in Seattle last Friday. For Longhorn, this roadmap represents somewhat lofty expectations. Microsoft has said Longhorn will include a major upgrade of its server platform. But, it has not yet released Windows .NET Server, which by most accounts is a relatively minor upgrade to Microsoft's existing server OS, Windows 2000. As of now, Windows .NET Server is expected for general availability in early 2003, leaving just about two years for Microsoft to revamp its server platform for Longhorn.
NEC blasted back into the high-end Windows scalability fray this week with the first major audited benchmark showing significant scalability for a 64-bit Windows-based system. At the Intel Developer Forum this week, NEC released a result from the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-C benchmark for On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) scalability using its 32-processor NEC TX7 Server. The database back-end was a single NEC TX7 Server with 32 Itanium 2 processors, pre-release code of 64-bit Windows .NET Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, and pre-release code of 64-bit SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition.