Microsoft is preparing to lob its latest weapon in the digital media war, announcing Monday the beta release timing of the next version of its Windows media platform, dubbed Corona. After months of speculation, the details of Corona, including the product's official name, launch date and additional consumer device manufacturer support, will finally be unveiled, company sources said, providing a further glimpse into the software giant's digital media strategy. Corona is the company's software engine for compressing and decoding video, and is the core of the next version of Media Player.
Microsoft faces competition from MPEG-4, Apple's QuickTime and RealPlayer, according to Gartenberg. Still, Microsoft's strength in the OS market has allowed it to do well with Windows Media. The Windows Media Player has recently closed in on RealPlayer, boasting 15 million users in the U.S., against Real's 17 million U.S. users, according to April 2002 data from researcher Nielsen/NetRatings. It remains to be seen whether the software leader will be able to wrangle more of the digital media market with its updated platform.
If you were responsible for building Microsoft Office, what would you do with the next version? This is a constant question at Microsoft, where they generally think a couple of releases ahead but still end up cramming in a bunch of last-minute changes to keep up with the current market. I don't know the precise schedule, but I'd expect the next release of Office to show up in a year or less. That means there's still plenty of time to make such late changes--and I have a few I'd like to suggest. For example:
- Better media editing
- Give Outlook better spam filtering
- Make Office a platform for Web-services development
- Expand "smart tags."
Microsoft Corp. has completed its acquisition of Danish software company Navision A/S in a stock deal valued at US$1.45 billion, the Redmond, Washington, software giant announced Thursday. Microsoft will now merge the Vedbaek, Denmark, company into its Business Solutions division, it said in a statement. Navision rival The Sage Group PLC, of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, opposed the deal. Sage asked the Danish competition authority to request a European Commission investigation into potential anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft and Navision, highlighting the possibility that Microsoft could flush smaller software companies out of the market by bundling Navision's accounting applications with its own software and then flooding the market at a low price.
Microsoft Corp., whose software has come to dominate the workplace, now wants to take over your living room. Last October, the Redmond [Wash.] software giant launched Windows XP, the new operating system that makes it a snap to organize music files and gather digital photos. Microsoft then jumped into the video gaming market, with its Xbox game console. And on July 11, it plans yet another bold foray, this time into home networking.
With global sales last year of $1.4 billion, home networking hardly holds the sex appeal -- or the profitability -- of the lucrative game console business. But Microsoft now believes that networking devices, known as routers, may be the key to controlling the digitally wired home. By selling routers that link PCs to game consoles, TVs, and other household devices, Microsoft is hoping to serve as the gatekeeper connecting consumers to the multibillion-dollar world of digital entertainment: games, movies, music, and other services.
Microsoft Wednesday released a new version of its Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) toolkit, an add-on that helps developers build Web services using its Visual Studio development tool. Microsoft's SOAP toolkit 3.0 includes support for DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation) and WS-Attachments, both of which define how to package binary data up with SOAP messages. While SOAP provides an envelope for exchanging structured XML information, it does not have an efficient way of exchanging binary data, Microsoft said. DIME and WS-Attachments provide a binary message format that reduces the overhead of dealing with attachments in SOAP. DIME is the message format; WS-Attachments defines how to encapsulate a SOAP message and attachments in a DIME message.
At a time when other software and computer hardware companies are being hit hard by the slump in corporate spending, Microsoft Corp. appears on track to post a fourth-quarter profit at the high end of its own guidance, analysts said. Microsoft's results, due after the close of U.S. markets on July 18, will be closely watched for how the software giant views the outlook for personal computer sales, which have remained weak despite signs of an economic recovery. Many analysts expect Microsoft to report fourth quarter earnings at the upper end of the 41 to 42-cents-per-share range that it has projected.
Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson on Thursday denied a market rumor, which boosted its share 2.5 percent in a falling market, that Microsoft Corp would make a bid for it. "On such rumors, please see the statement from last week from our Chairman Michael Treschow that we are not in any takeover talks or similar alliances, and that we are now focusing on the rights issue which is to be carried out in the third quarter," Ericsson spokesman Mads Madsen told Reuters. At 9:23 GMT Ericsson traded 2.5 percent higher at 16.2 crowns when the DJ Stoxx technology index was down 0.8 percent and the Nordic stock index was 1.5 percent lower, making Ericsson one of the top gainers in Europe.
Intel Corp. is pushing up the release of a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 to this summer in hopes of boosting sagging sales of its flagship PC processor, sources close to the company say. In addition to raising the bar for its fastest chip from 2.53GHz to 2.8GHz, the Santa Clara, Calif., company also is considering additional price cuts this quarter in a bid to reduce its rising supply of unsold Pentium processors, sources say. In a bid to boost the attractiveness of its leading brand, Intel moved up the launch of its 2.8GHz Pentium 4 from the fourth quarter to this summer, sources said. The chip, which will be released in the coming weeks, will initially be offered at $637, with the price of its current speed king, a 2.53GHz chip, falling from $637 to $433. Intel also will release a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 priced at $562 and a 1.9GHz Celeron costing $138. Prices are based on 1,000-unit quantities.
Microsoft is extending to its enterprise customers a developer program previously only available to commercial software vendors, offering free resources and tools for building applications and systems based on the .Net platform. The company Wednesday launched a new program it calls the .Net Architecture Center, and has created an online community for developers building applications with Microsoft software. Online at the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) Web site, the online community has a collection of technology road maps, application blueprints and reference architectures that enterprise developers can use in the development process. He said the developer community is an important step for Microsoft to take in order to boost interest in its .Net infrastructure.
After repeated delays, Microsoft is finally ready to ship its Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 software, formerly code-named Stinger, in the coming weeks but mobile phones based on the software may not appear for up to six months after its release, a company executive said here Tuesday. "The smart-phone [software] is going to be released literally any day now," said Roberto Cazzaro, international director at Microsoft's Mobility Division. "It's a question of weeks." Although Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 is nearly ready to ship, phones based on the software are unlikely to appear for up to six more months, as hardware makers ready their phones for mass production and mobile operators continue network trials using phones based on the software, Cazzaro said.
Looking ahead, Microsoft plans to release an updated version of the Windows Powered Smartphone software along with an updated version of its Pocket PC software. Scheduled to ship during the first quarter of 2003, both products will be based on a new Windows CE operating system kernel that will ship at the same time, rather than the Windows CE 3.0 kernel that is used in Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 and Pocket PC 2002, Cazzaro said.