In Taipei this week for the Taiwan Computex 2002 trade show, Microsoft revealed a few sobering details about its upcoming remote display technology for home users, currently code-named "Mira." If successful, Mira will finally bring Windows Terminal Services into the home, providing consumers with a way to access their desktop machine remotely from anywhere in the house. But Mira's price and exclusivity may be major stumbling blocks that prevent the technology from taking off with its intended audience.
First, the price. For Mira to be successful, Microsoft's hardware partners will have to price the units competitively and perform an educational campaign in order to sell consumers on the wonders of remote displays. But the first round of Mira devices, which will range from 8 inch secondary displays to 15 inch primary displays, will be priced in the $500 to $1000 range, far above the price of mainstream consumer electronics devices and well within the range of many full PC systems. At this price, Mira will attract early adopters and technology enthusiasts, but not the wider consumer market.
AGP 8X -- or AGP 3.0 as Intel calls -- it is about to become a very important feature and you will be amazed how many racks of cards with this interface you'll have to fight your way through this autumn when wading through your local computer store. At the time of introduction, AGP 4X offered a performance increase of two to three per cent over its predecessor. And still, most games don't need the 1024 Mb of bandwidth that you can get with AGP 4X so why would you need the 2048Mb you can get with AGP 8X? One new fact that I can bring to my previous work on this subject is that even now, if you use an AGP 2X board, you should not experience more than 10 per cent of performance lag against an AGP 4X interface.
Microsoft on Wednesday made available to testers the first beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP Home and Professional editions. Company officials downplayed reports of a radical upgrade, calling SP1 "in most ways a traditional service pack" that is slated to include security fixes, compatibility updates and new drivers issued since XP's launch last October. Over 10,000 beta testers will be given access to download the SP1 beta starting today.
"Of note, included in the security updates will be fixes developed during the security push done by the entire Windows division as part of Microsoft's renewed emphasis on security for customers," a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews. "In addition to these traditional elements, Microsoft is fulfilling its commitment to implement the changes required by the consent decree signed with the Department of Justice and nine settling states."
Let me get this straight. Ralph Nader -- former presidential candidate (and close friend of Al Gore), consumer crusader and political activist -- believes the way to bring Bill Gates to his knees is for President Bush, in the guise of the Office of Management and Budget, to mandate that the government limit its purchases of Microsoft products. In other words, spread the dollars around to Apple, IBM, Corel, Linux firms and other manufacturers to encourage competition and get better pricing. Nader even goes so far as to suggest that the federal government buy the code for Microsoft Office outright, and release it into the public domain in order to save the public money and avoid the costly upgrades from Microsoft that are designed to overcome interoperability problems.
Nice try, Mr. Nader I am not convinced that putting Office code in the public domain would go a long way toward solving the government's dysfunctional IT or cost overrun problems (see FBI most wanted: new IT priorities). I'm pleased that you're keeping the heat on Microsoft. So far the Department of Justice and the U.S. District Court haven't been able to come up with the solution to reign in the company. But while your goals are worthy, the means are way off target.
Microsoft Corp. will release new technologies next year designed to allow companies to easily share information about customers, employees and other common users of applications and networks, the company said on Thursday. The announcement is the latest from the Redmond, Washington-based software giant in its push into the nascent Web services market and marked a more cooperative approach to a rival effort led by Sun Microsystems Inc. Under Web services, the goal is to enable companies to share information with each other, customers, partners and suppliers, across disparate applications and networks. The new Microsoft technologies, code-named "TrustBridge," will appear in products next year, but which products will use it has yet to be determined, said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web Services technical marketing for Microsoft.
Microsoft on Wednesday released its first external beta release for Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), its upcoming update to XP that will add new features, support for new technology, and a bevy of bug fixes. Most notably, XP SP1 includes security fixes for vulnerabilities found during Microsoft's recent Trustworthy Computing-inspired code review, and a set of changes to the Windows user interface necessitated by the company's proposed antitrust settlement with the US government.
"Today, Microsoft released the first beta of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional," Microsoft announced. "As you know, SP1 is in most ways a traditional service pack and will include security fixes, application compatibility updates and updated drivers since the October launch. Of note, included in the security updates will be fixes developed during the security push done by the entire Windows division as part of Microsoft's renewed emphasis on security for customers.
After over four years of development, the open source browser suite project dubbed Mozilla has reached its first major release. Mozilla 1.0 is based on the Gecko rendering engine, which provides the display technology behind the suite's Navigator Web browser, Mail & Newsgroup client, IRC Chat client, Composer HTML editor, and Address Book. But the real promise behind the software is that its open, componentized design can be used as the basis for other products, including the next version of Netscape's browser suite. And it runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac OS (classic), Mac OS X, and others.
Microsoft is developing new security software it hopes will make Web services and its entire product lineup more appealing to big companies.
The software maker will announce plans on Thursday for technology code-named TrustBridge that will allow businesses to authenticate user identities between companies and applications using Web services standards. With TrustBridge--which will debut next year--Microsoft is attempting to solve a common problem faced by workers in big companies: too many user identifications and passwords, said Adam Sohn, a product manager at Microsoft.
While Microsoft's existing Passport single sign-on ID system is targeted at consumers, TrustBridge will let business users log onto Windows-based systems hosted locally, or remotely at partner companies, using a single ID. That ID can be created through Passport, through Active Directory, Microsoft's directory server software included with Windows, or through any other ID system on any operating system that supports Kerberos, a network security standard.
Microsoft is using the diplomacy card in China as it tries to stamp out piracy and put a curb on the growing popularity of open-source software. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is courting government officials, donating money to educational projects, and investing in joint ventures with local companies, said Jun Tang, president of Microsoft China. A few years back, the company was grappling with widespread piracy and with charges, brought by its former top China executive, that it price-gouged Chinese customers.
"We just signed a deal with the State Council," the country's chief governing body, Tang said. "They all use Microsoft products." Still, the company must contend with the realities of the market in China. Linux is catching on here. Earlier this year, the Asia-Pacific wing of research firm Gartner said 15 percent of companies in the region--excluding Japan-- used Linux in the fourth quarter of 2001, up from between 5 percent and 7 percent a year earlier.
Microsoft's MSN said Wednesday that Hotmail users who want to retrieve e-mail from outside accounts through the service will have to pay up starting July 16. In an e-mail notice to Hotmail users, MSN announced that for $19.95 a year, MSN Extra Storage would allow them to continue to use POP Mail Retrieval. The POP service allows customers to access various e-mail accounts through one Hotmail account. In addition, the paid service provides 10MB of Hotmail storage, allowing people to send and receive larger attachments, and ensures that unused accounts will not expire. Hotmail requires its free users to log on every 30 days to keep an account active.