Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates today responded to critics who call his company's .NET initiative incomplete and lacking innovation by acknowledging that it will take at least four or five years before the promise of .Net is realized. ".Net is not an overnight thing," Gates told 325 university facility members as he opened the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit here. "A lot of work needs to be done to put standards such as reliable messaging and transaction support in place. We have a commitment to XML to allow for information exchange."
And Benjamin Benderson, director of the human computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, demonstrated the DataLens research project for mobile devices. The project enhanced the calendar in the Windows CE interface so that it uses the .Net Compact Framework, and is written entirely in C#.
During the month since Microsoft announced Palladium, the new plan to marry hardware and software security inside every Windows PC has been hailed as either a potential savior or a scourge for computer security and user freedom. Details about Palladium, which remains years from mass deployment, have been sketchy and are bound to change, but Microsoft is now providing more information about the system, what it will do and what it won't.
Palladium will create a "trusted space" within a PC where certain applications and operations can run. Palladium will require a security chip, as well as rewritten software designed to take advantage of the chip. Because the "trusted space" will be separate from Windows, Palladium should be able to better protect sensitive information and stop the spread of viruses and the like, according to Microsoft. The system will also allow users to create documents that expire after a certain amount of time or are limited in how they can be shared, Microsoft has said.
The tactics it used to crush what was then its most dangerous competitor, Netscape Communications Corp., creator of the first commercial Web browser and now part of AOL Time Warner Inc., landed Microsoft in a bitter antitrust case with the Justice Department that left many observers believing Microsoft was on the ropes. But the company has rebounded. Microsoft has ridden out the devastating economic downturn better than many of its competitors, thanks to the dominance of its Windows operating system and Office software tools.
While most other companies are slashing their payrolls and reducing spending, Microsoft said last week that it would add 5,000 jobs to its work force of 50,000 and boost its research-and-development budget by 20 percent, to $5.2 billion.
''There was a time when many of us thought that Microsoft was past its prime,'' said Jerry Fiddler, chairman of Wind River Systems Inc., which makes operating systems for everything from tape recorders to cars - a market Microsoft has been eyeing for years. ''But they've definitely strengthened, no question.''
Web services are still used primarily to integrate information within companies. But recent decisions by Amazon.com Inc. and search-engine Web-site operator Google Inc. to deploy Web services may give the technology more credibility for use in business-to-business settings.
Amazon has deployed a Web-services platform that the online retailer's 800,000 marketing affiliates can use in building Web sites that incorporate content and features from Amazon. The Web services, for example, will let third-party sites search for and display products from Amazon or provide access to Amazon reviews. Amazon affiliates will earn referral fees of up to 15% for each Amazon sale made via the links.
A Web services directory effort spawned by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba has been updated before its submission to an industry standards body. The specification, called Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), identifies and catalogs Web services so they can be easily found online. A consortium of 220 companies is releasing a third version of the specification on Tuesday and submitting the technology to a standards body known as the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
Microsoft, IBM and Ariba proposed the directory technology nearly two years ago as sort of a Yahoo for business services. The idea was to build an online database using UDDI that would help companies find Web-based software services that could be used as part of their own business systems. For example, an e-commerce site could use the directory to search for a business that handles credit card transactions. If a match were found, all the elements of the transaction--even the price and payment--could be handled electronically.
A report in C/NET-ZDNET (they're the same now, right?) this weekend either explains the secret reason for the very public Microsoft-Apple rift that came to light two weeks ago, or provides all the ammunition Microsoft needs to finally bail from its failing relationship with the Mac maker. According to the report, Apple is working with Sun Microsystems to port the OpenOffice and StarOffice office productivity suites to Mac OS X, providing Mac users with free or low-cost alternatives to Microsoft's pricey Office v. X, which retails for $500.
Let that sink in for a moment, because the potential repercussions are huge. In August 1997, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the then-failing company was receiving an important shot in the arm from its one-time rival, Microsoft: The company invested $150 million in Apple along with an undisclosed sum--said to be in excess of $1 billion--to settle previous patent disputes. But more important, Microsoft agreed to a five year software development deal, during which time it would continue releasing new Office versions for the Mac, a crucial sign for consumers that the platform was still viable. In return, Apple also agreed to replace Netscape with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) as the default Web browser on new Mac systems.
Microsoft despite its ailing stock price, ended its fiscal year in June with $38 billion in cold hard cash, plus another $14 billion in equity holdings. That's more than the value of all of AOL Time Warner, which, with a market cap of $47 billion. The problem is what to do with the cash. Some investors would love Microsoft to return the money to them in the form of a dividend. But as Michael Mauboussin, an analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston, argued in an excellent report this week, two shareholders who'd hate to see a dividend are Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Because dividends are taxed as ordinary income, Gates and Ballmer would have to pay taxes at a rate of 38.6 percent, compared with 20 percent for long-term capital gains.
Microsoft's redesign of the product activation system, due to be introduced with WinXP Service Pack 1. Our sources say that yes, a slipstreamed install of SP1 will mean you have to get a new key from Microsoft, but confirm that if you just install over the existing installation this won't be the case.
Microsoft will be blocking installation of SP1 and further access to Windows Update for installations using any of three leaked keys, and there still seems to be some doubt as to how far beyond this the company will go. It is still possible that users of these keys will find themselves locked out of their machines, but this would be a significant escalation, particularly as earlier this year Microsoft said users with leaked keys would be able to carry on using their machine, they just wouldn't be able to update it.
But the war is iterative, and Microsoft no doubt views its activities as slowly improving its chances of damping down piracy and warez, rather than eliminating it entirely. Whether or not WPA is the sensible way to do it is another matter, but for the moment WPA is what Microsoft has got.
Microsoft will hold a research conference next week detailing technology development its labs as well as ongoing projects sponsored by Microsoft at universities. The Faculty Summit, which takes place as the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters, will focus on the state of computer research, current engineering trends and the company's .Net initiative, among other issues. Speech recognition and natural language processing, two areas of intense research at Microsoft, will also likely be discussed. More than 300 researchers from various universities are expected to attend. Chairman Bill Gates will deliver a keynote speech on Monday. Rick Rashid, the head of Microsoft Research and a former professor at Carnegie Mellon, will also speak.
Microsoft is in the process of overhauling its security response process in an effort to get patches to customers more quickly and to make it easier for researchers to report vulnerabilities. The company is also beginning to use the data that it collects in this process as part of its Secure Windows Initiative (SWI) training.
One of the largest components of this change is an independent testing process for every patch that the company creates. After the Microsoft Security Response Center team builds a new patch, it is submitted for testing. The MSRC also now sends fixes to the individual researchers who discovered the vulnerabilities to verify that they actually fix the issue at hand.