Microsoft has once again tweaked the name of the successor to Windows 2000 Server, in a move that suggests its official release won't come until next year. During the Redmond, Wash.-based company's annual employee meeting this week, executives revealed that the follow-up to Windows 2000 Server will be called Windows .Net Server 2003. Microsoft developed the high-end operating system under the code-name Whistler. In April 2001, it officially named the product Windows 2002 Server. Microsoft later changed the name to Windows .Net Server and has now added 2003 to the product.
"I know 2003 release is way further out than they were talking about," Gillen said. "But I'm not sure that the customer base is sitting around waiting for this product. It's another release coming pretty close to another major release. I think 2003 will be good for them." The majority of NT 4 holdouts would likely go to Windows 2000 Server, he said.
Computers will become simpler, faster, flexible and more connected over the next decade, says the No. 2 man at the world's largest software maker. Ballmer said Microsoft has changed its mission. Instead of a computer on every desk, the company wants to develop technology that helps people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
To do that, Ballmer said, computer products must be easier to use. He said his belief is people shouldn't have to learn codes and abbreviations to make products work. Computers must be quicker and smaller so they can be slipped into a pocket so they are more convenient. But above all they must be connected to one another.
Microsoft changed the name of the family of server operating systems it plans to release next year to Windows .NET Server 2003, company representatives said late Thursday.
The new name is the fourth for the family of server operating systems. Its code-name was "Whistler," a name it shared with pre-release versions of the Windows XP client operating system that shipped in October. It was briefly known as Windows 2002 in the spring of 2001. Then Microsoft renamed the OS family "Windows .NET Server" in line with a company-wide move to insert the .NET brand of its Web services initiative into many product lines.
With little fanfare, Microsoft Corp. has shuttered its BizTalk.Org XML schema warehouse.
According to a mid-July posting to the XML-dev list maintained by the OASIS standards organization, Microsoft execs claimed the ubiquity of the XML data format, coupled with the preponderance of other XML schema repositories, eliminated the need for BizTalk.Org. The BizTalk.Org page now refers interested parties to Microsoft's BizTalk Server product home page, with no BizTalk.Org information available.
BizTalk.Org was one of a number of XML schema consortia founded in the late 1990s. These consortia, which included OASIS' XML.Org, RosettaNet and the Object Management Group, were designed to house the growing number of business-to-business schema under development by companies across the vertical-market spectrum.
It's been basic Microsoft philosophy forever to make products as available, as scriptable, and as powerful as possible. Things have changed. After two years of assaults from security consultants and Internet vandals, Microsoft has decided that discretion--when it comes to an Internet service--is the better part of valor. Now they have to sit and think of ways to prevent users from accessing features.
After you install Windows .Net Server, IIS6 may or may not even be installed, depending on your license. Once it's installed, it is not automatically enabled. Once enabled, its default configuration is a locked-down state that can't do anything really useful. You must enable the features. Beyond that, there are new filtering features borrowed from firewalls, such as the ability to filter out potential attacking requests before they are processed. All this--in combination with the new Web Server Edition, and if Microsoft's performance claims for IIS6 are true--could make IIS6 very popular in hosting environments and other pure Web applications.
Ha, you say, everyone knows IIS is a bad security joke. But in fact, I think that in the last year or so the absence of any significant new attacks on IIS is partly a result of new tools and patches available from Microsoft. It's easier now to make IIS systems secure, and IIS6 extends that trend. Even though new vulnerabilities have been reported recently, many of these are already patched, and there has been a healthy dose of exaggeration related to some of the vulnerabilities.
By 2007, yearly revenue from servers running Itanium processors, a 64-bit family of chips for high-end servers that typically run four or more processors, will come to approximately $4 billion, according to Gartner analyst Jeff Hewitt. By contrast, servers running UltraSparc, the competing chip family from Sun Microsystems, will account for $6.6 billion. Revenue from IBM machines using the Power processor will total $8.6 billion, Hewitt said.
Although it may be third in 64-bit servers, Intel is expected to wield increasing influence through the sale of its processors for smaller machines. The increasing popularity of its 32-bit server chips, which are essentially beefed up versions of the processors found in desktops and notebooks, will account for $27 billion in sales in 2007, Hewitt projects.
Box said Microsoft has been "moving awfully fast" with its Global XML Architecture (GXA) for Web services. "We can't rev [revise] the .Net Framework fast enough to keep up with the innovation in GXA." Box cited an interoperability demonstration between IBM and Microsoft here at the conference as evidence that the technology is constantly improving.
But, Box posed the question of why Microsoft is pursuing a Web services strategy. "Because we hit the wall with the prior technology," he said. He said Microsoft's COM (Component Object Model) and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) hit the wall. "On the XML front we needed a replacement for DCOM, so XML Web services is the way we went. Microsoft has bet the company on this thing and it is our intention to make all software integration based on Web services."
With the release of Netscape 7.0, Netscape Communications Corp. and its parent AOL have finally completed the transformation of the browser from a powerful and highly customizable Web and e-mail client to an intrusive home-user-focused client more on par with Microsoft Corp,'s MSN Explorer and the AOL client itself. The fact that Netscape 7.0 arrives hot on the heels of the similar but superior Mozilla 1.1 only serves to illuminate the small but significant differences between the two: Mozilla is highly customizable and offers a number of user options, while Netscape forces users to accept many features and functions they probably don't want while removing some they probably do.
eWEEK Labs recommends that any business looking for browser options to Microsoft's Internet Explorer examine Mozilla or Opera Software's Opera rather than the corporate-unfriendly Netscape.
The impending update to Microsoft's Windows XP operating system is expected to give end-users more control over applications that launch by default on PCs as well as more advanced wireless connectivity. Microsoft is set to deliver Windows XP Service Pack 1, a set of bug fixes, feature upgrades, and technical tweaks, to manufacturers sometime "in the next 10 days," said Charmaine Gravning, product manager with Microsoft's Windows division. Users will eventually be able to download it or purchase it for $9.95 on a CD, soon after manufacturers get their hands on it, Gravning said.
Windows XP Service Pack 1 will also add support for new computers such as the Tablet PC and the "Mira" desktop computer, officially known as the Windows Powered Smart Display, whose monitor and CPU are connected wirelessly, allowing users to access their hard drive and the Internet from the detached monitor.
Microsoft is seeking to underline the trust in its antitrust settlement. Though there was no legal requirement for it to do so, the software titan on Wednesday issued a progress report on the work it's been doing to comply with a proposed agreement it reached last year with the Justice Department and nine states.
In its seven-page filing, Microsoft pointed to several milestones it had reached in accordance with the consent decree: Tuesday's release of application programming interfaces, the recent disclosure of Windows communications protocols, and the introduction of a new control into Windows 2000 and Windows XP that will let PC makers keep middleware such as the Internet Explorer browser off the software desktop.